A very clear, fine day. I had a poor night but the sunlight made me feel a little better. My first amusement was to read the newspaper criticism of my speech. The Times is manifestly a little disconcerted by it, and it scarcely knows how to strike it without betraying too strongly its malignity. The News treats it generously. The other papers vary in tone according to their disposition. On the whole the stroke appears to have been good. My day was a good deal absorbed in reading the American newspapers. The details of the disaster are trying enough, but from other matters I gather a little encouragement. My great anxiety is now however about eh expedition which has just started for the South. The chances of such are always very unfavorable. Should the same illfortune attend us here, or the same misconduct, then will our case be pretty desperate. The reading of the American papers followed so as to waste my day pretty completely. I took a walk with Mary down to Oxford Street; thence to the Marble Arch, then along the Edgeware road to Earl Street, thence to Marylebone road and Harley Street home. It took about an hour and a half. After dinner I called for Sidney Brooks, and we went to Burlington House to attend the first meeting of the Geographical Society for the season. I had received a card of invitation for them all. The room was quite full, so that we barely succeeded in getting seats. In the absence of Lord Ashburton, Sir Roderick Marchison took the chair. A great many elections of members were announced and then two papers were read. One upon the exploration of an interior promise of China. Another upon the region of the Caucasus. Bother furnished information but in so bald a manner that they met with rather an ungracious reception. There is far less of courtesy in this country than with us. A man may try the patience of his audience a great while longer without their wincing. Always excepting the deference paid to rank which gilds a large number of bald places. After the second gentleman had been driven to surrender, the President, who treated him rather summarily as exceeding his promise in discussing ethnography rather than geography, he called upon Sir Henry Rawlinson and Mr Danby Seymour to say something on the same subject. Each of them did little more than to repeat and confirm the words of the condemned lecturer.278