The Court Circular of politics is all in confusion—its record
meagre, its portents doubtful. Mr. Disraeli, now in Paris, has been visiting M. Guizot and M. Kisseleff—the advocate of the Bourbon Fusion and the Russian Plenipotentiary ; and it is too hastily inferred that there will be a Member for St. Petersburg in the House of Commons, over and above the friend of Grand. Duke Constantine, Sir Charles Napier. No announcement has been vouchsafed from Woburn as the result of Lord Palmerston's visit ; and the public is left almost as much in suspense about the future position and title of Lord John Russell as about the elevation of Mr. Russell Gurney to the London Recordership which morally belongs to him, or of Mr. Bodkin to the post of Common Sergeant. Lord Derby lives hospitably at Knowsley,
apparently resigned to the fate in store for lam, even though it involve the loss of a Disraeli as'leader in the House of Commons. And the Quarterly Review having condemned the actual officers of the Opposition, the party is obligingly ifurnished with a new leader, by the Daily News ! If Mr. Disraeli has been the mill- stone round the neck of the party, our contemporary sees through that millstone, and descries Mr. Gladstone, that ambitious man, assuming the post of Opposition leader. The signs of this junc- tion are not very obvious, and we doubt whether there is any further warrant for it than a general suspicion of " the Peelites," —a party -without body, and apparently without positive object. As leader of an Opposition, on the principle of fiscal improve- ment and economized expenditure, Mr. Gladstone might have both a locus standi and a popular mission ; and he might in that course find himself followed by both sides of Manchester : but there is as yet nothing like an announcement of such a com- bination.
