he rival pretensions of contending statesmen. They did not profess to
be deep in the mysteries of foreign cabinets (with the exception of one
young gentleman connected with the Foreign Office, who prided himself on
knowing exactly what the Russians meant to do with India--when they
got it); but, to make amends, the majority of them had penetrated the
closest secrets of our own. It is true that, according to a proper
subdivision of labor, each took some particular member of the government
for his special observation; just as the most skilful surgeons, however
profoundly versed in the general structure of our frame, rest their
anatomical fame on the light they throw on particular parts of it,--one
man taking the brain, another the duodenum, a third the spinal cord,
while a fourth, perhaps, is a master of all the symptoms indicated by a
pensile finger. Accordingly, one of my friends appropriated to himself
the Home Department; another the Colonies; and a third, whom we all
regarded as a future Talleyrand (or a De Retz at least), had devoted
himself to the special study of Sir Robert Peel, and knew, by the way in
which that profound and inscrutable statesman threw open his coat, every
thought that was passing in his breast! Whether lawyers or officials,
they all had a great idea of themselves,--high notions of what they were
to be, rather than what they were to do, some day. As the king of modern
fine gentlemen said to himself, in paraphrase of Voltaire, "They had
letters in their pockets addressed to Posterity,--which the chances
were, however, that they might forget to deliver." Somewhat "priggish"
most of them might be; but, on the whole, they were far more interesting
than mere idle men of pleasure. There was about them, as features of a
general family likeness, a redundant activity of life, a gay exuberance
of ambition, a light-hearted earnestness when at work, a schoolboy's
enjoyment of the hours of play.

A great contrast to these young men was Sir Sedley Beaudesert, who was
pointedly kind to me, and whose bachelor's house was always open to me
after noon: Sir Sedley was visible to no one but his valet before that
hour. A perfect bachelor's house it was, too, with its windows opening
on the Park, and sofas nicked into the windows, on which you might loll
at your ease, like the philosopher in Lucretius,--

"Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre Errare,"--

and see the gay crowds ride to and fro Rotten Row,