NEWS OF THE WEEK.
Oua account of the Whig aspirations after a return to office last week has received singular confirmation, at the hands of the most accomplished bureaucrat of the late Ministry, Lord PALMERSTON, in his recently-published reply to the Bridgnorth address. It is a very entertaining state paper. Removed from the scene of late defeats, holyday-making down in the country, Lord PALMERSTON seems almost to have forgotten that he and his colleagues ever were out of power. It is true that he directly mentions the fact ; but while he predicates of the Ministry that it has ceased to exist, his state of feeling is shown by his speaking of them in the present tense; ter it is not to be supposed that so acute a verbal critic as the owner,and commentator of " Ilione" can have fallen into mere vulgar laxity of grammar. On the ether hand, as that which is near our eyes seems large in prwartion to more distant objects— as a little finger held close to the pupil may exclude the sight of a planet—so the Town-Council immediately before Lord PALMER- STON seems to have shut out the whole world, besides: he took it for the British nation. The Corporation of Bridgnorth wishes Lord PALMERSTON and his colleagues back to office ; Lord PAL- MERSTON wishes it too ; and AS he an6 the Town-Council of Bridgnorth are quite agreed, bout the matter, he has no doubt of the result. The triumph of the Tories will be short-lived: so thought Lord PALMERSTON on the 25th of November.
The publication of his manifesto this week, however, is a prac- tical anachronism ; for the beginning of the same week saw a marked conversion in the creed of his party : they no longer put faith in their own advent—except their advent to popularity as the leaders of an efficient Opposition, zealous in good works. The Morning Post, indeed, ascribes that conversion to the Spectator : putting together our exposition of the necessity of things with an echo of that exposition in the Chronicle of Tuesday, it takes antecedent and sequel for cause and effect. For our part, we can the more sincerely disclaim such influence with our worthy brother, that we had already noted his " lately-improved tactics," and a much nearer approximation to our own estimate of the state of parties than would have been thought possible two or three months ago—thereunto converted by mature reflection and the course of events. Be that as it may, the leading Whig journal is ranged against the policy so persuasively hinted at by Lord PALMERSTON, of trying for a speedy readmission to office ; and, referring back from Lord PALMERSTON to Lord Joan- RUSSELL, it picks out the only sentence in the Endsleigh address which can be swelled into a motto for the new Whig policy—that it is not necessary that the late Ministers should be restored to power in order to the comple- tion of great measures. Perhaps Lord JOHN will be surprised at the breadth of meaning given to his words as they are echoed by his adherents ; perhaps he will not altogether relish the kind of in- verse process by which he is made to assert his content to remain in Opposition not for a brief space : but in that sense have his words been accepted with a tumultuous admiration which it might be inconvenient to check. And so poor Lord PALMERSTON, who was absent while all this change was working, comes upon the . scene smirking and smiling, to keep up a plot which his fellow- labourers have dropped.
