On the 11th of this month there is to be a dinner given to Lushington by the electors of the Tower Hamlets.  He has persecuted me with importunities to attend, and make a speech for him; and my father has joined in the request.  It is enough, in these times, Heaven knows, for a man who represents, as I do, a town of a hundred and twenty thousand people to keep his own constituents in good humour; and the Spitalfields weavers, and Whitechapel butchers, are nothing to me.  But, ever since I succeeded in what everybody allows to have been the most hazardous attempt of the kind ever made,—­I mean in persuading an audience of manufacturers, all Whigs or Radicals, that the immediate alteration of the corn-laws was impossible,—­I have been considered as a capital physician for desperate cases in politics.  However,—­to return from that delightful theme, my own praises,—­Lushington, who is not very popular with the rabble of the Tower Hamlets, thinks that an oration from me would give him a lift.  I could not refuse him directly, backed as he was by my father.  I only said that I would attend if I were in London on the 11th; but I added that, situated as I was, I thought it very probable that I should be out of town.

I shall go to-night to Miss Berry’s soiree.  I do not know whether I told you that she resented my article on Horace Walpole so much that Sir Stratford Canning advised me not to go near her.  She was Walpole’s greatest favourite.  His Reminiscences are addressed to her in terms of the most gallant eulogy.  When he was dying at past eighty, he asked her to marry him, merely that he might make her a Countess and leave her his fortune.  You know that in Vivian Grey she is called Miss Otranto.  I always expected that my article would put her into a passion, and I was not mistaken; but she has come round again, and sent me a most pressing and kind invitation the other day.

I have been racketing lately, having dined twice with Rogers, and once with Grant.  Lady Holland is in a most extraordinary state.  She came to Rogers’s, with Allen, in so bad a humour that we were all forced to rally, and make common cause against her.  There was not a person at table to whom she was not rude; and none of us were inclined to submit.  Rogers sneered; Sydney made merciless sport of her.  Tom Moore looked excessively impertinent; Bobus put her down with simple straightforward rudeness; and I treated her with what I meant to be the coldest civility.  Allen flew into a rage with us all, and especially with Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed tremendous.  When she and all the rest were gone, Rogers made Tom Moore and me sit down with him for half an hour, and we coshered over the events of the evening.  Rogers said that he thought Allen’s firing up in defence of his patroness the best thing that he had seen in him.  No sooner had Tom and I got into the street than he broke forth:  “That such an old stager as Rogers should talk such nonsense, and give Allen credit for attachment to anything but his dinner!  Allen was bursting with envy to see us so free, while he was conscious of his own slavery.”