ing which, if they
told, would free them from the supreme ridicule of their situation, but
which, as men of delicacy and honour, they refrained from revealing.
All those who had been in fluttering hopes, however faint, of receiving
preferment, took courage now that the occasion had passed, and loudly
complained of their cruel and undeniable deprivation. The constitution
was wounded in their persons. Some fifty gentlemen who had not been
appointed under secretaries of state, moaned over the martyrdom of young
ambition.

"Peel ought to have taken office," said Lord Marney. "What are the women
to us?"

"Peel ought to have taken office," said the Duke of Fitz-Aquitaine. "He
should have remembered how much he owed to Ireland."

"Peel ought to have taken office," said Lord de Mowbray. "The garter
will become now a mere party badge."

Perhaps it may be allowed to the impartial pen that traces these
memoirs of our times to agree, though for a different reason, with these
distinguished followers of Sir Robert Peel. One may be permitted to
think that, under all circumstances, he should have taken office in
1839. His withdrawal seems to have been a mistake. In the great heat
of parliamentary faction which had prevailed since 1831, the royal
prerogative, which, unfortunately for the rights and liberties
and social welfare of the people, had since 1688 been more or less
oppressed, had waned fainter and fainter. A youthful princess on the
throne, whose appearance touched the imagination, and to whom her
people were generally inclined to ascribe something of that decision
of character which becomes those born to command, offered a favourable
opportunity to restore the exercise of that regal authority, the
usurpation of whose functions has entailed on the people of England so
much suffering and so much degradation. It was unfortunate that one
who, if any, should have occupied the proud and national position of the
leader of the tory party, the chief of the people and the champion of
the throne, should have commenced his career as minister under Victoria
by an unseemly contrariety to the personal wishes of the Queen. The
reaction of public opinion, disgusted with years of parliamentary tumult
and the incoherence of party legislation, the balanced state in the
kingdom of political parties themselves, the personal character of the
sovereign--these were all causes which intimated that a movement in
favour of prerogative was at hand. T