The most irksome of my life here is the attendance on the court and the society. Never very well fitted for it by nature, the progress of time has robbed it of all attention, and leaves the labor to be felt as a burden. This morning I felt that my supper had just left enough of its effects to make me comfortable, though certainly the error could be in no degree charged to excess. I was therefore glad of a quiet day and evening. After the despatch of my regular work, I amused myself with my numismatic pursuits. I find them giving a very essential relaxation from the monotonous anxiety of my political duties. Mr Aspinwall called to see me. He is just from Paris, and tells me a conversation he had with M Chevalier, in which he spoke of the troubles imposed by the Mexican expedition, and the anxiety of the Emperor to get rid of it. Originally, he said, there might have been an idea of making it a base of operations on the eastward, but that had been all abandoned. The great object was to get a creditable way out. He likewise remarked that Lord Palmerston, through hating us heartily, was now firmly fixed in the policy of nonintervention. All this accords with what Sir William Brown told me a day or two since of the assurances to the same effect given to him by several cabinet ministers, as well as with the conversation Mr Evarts reports he has had with Messr d’Israeli and Sir Stafford Northcote indicative of a similar policy on that side. Yet after all, the only reliance we can have is in the conduct of the war. Our results are not yet sufficiently decisive to put the issue beyond doubt. On the whole, looking back at the course of the past two years we have thus far threaded our way through these difficulties with more success than could have been anticipated. I still have an abiding hope that we may surmount them all so as to reach the real end, the destruction of this tremendous slave power. I took a solitary walk in the Park as far as to the top of Primrose hill and back again. The frequent showers of late have at once revived the verdure and restored the beauty of the landscape. A comfortable dinner, and an evening in the family, in which I resumed the long broken thread of Mr Kinglake’s narrative.386