In the mean time party
spirit here has reached a tremendous pitch; old friendships are
broken up and old intimacies cease; former cordial acquaintances
refuse to meet each other, houses are divided, and the dearest
relations disturbed, if not destroyed. Society is become a sort of
battle-field, for every man (and woman too) is nothing if not
political. In fact, there really appears to be no middle or
moderating party, which I think strange and to be deplored. It
seems as if it were a mere struggle between the nobility and the
mobility, and the middle-class--that vast body of good sense,
education, and wealth, and efficient to hold the beam even between
the scales--throws itself man by man into one or the other of them,
and so only swells the adverse parties on each side.
Parliament meets again in a few days, and then comes the tug of
war. Lord John Russell was at Oatlands while we were there, and as
the Francis Egertons and their guests were all anti-Reformers, they
led him rather a hard life. He bore all their attacks with great
good humor, however, and with the well-satisfied smile of a man who
thinks himself on the right, and knows himself on the safe side,
and wisely forbore to reply to their sallies.
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