who has written Q.C. after his name must abandon his practice
behind the bar. As he then was, although he had already been driven
by the unhappy circumstance of his peerage from the House of Commons
which he loved so well, there were still open to him many fields of
political work. But if he should once consent to stand on the top
rung of the ladder, he could not, he thought, take a lower place
without degradation. Till he should have been placed quite at the top
no shifting his place from this higher to that lower office would
injure him in his own estimation. The exigencies of the service and
not defeat would produce such changes as that. But he could not go
down from being Prime Minister and serve under some other chief
without acknowledging himself to have been unfit for the place he
had filled. Of all that he had quite assured himself. And yet he had
allowed the old Duke to talk him into a doubt!

As he sat considering the question he acknowledged that there might
have been room for doubt, though in the present emergency there
certainly was none. He could imagine circumstances in which the
experience of an individual in some special branch of his country's
service might be of such paramount importance to the country as to
make it incumbent on a man to sacrifice all personal feeling. But it
was not so with him. There was nothing now which he could do, which
another might not do as well. That blessed task of introducing
decimals into all the commercial relations of British life, which
had once kept him aloft in the air, floating as upon eagle's wings,
had been denied him. If ever done it must be done from the House of
Commons; and the people of the country had become deaf to the charms
of that great reform. Othello's occupation was, in truth, altogether
gone, and there was no reason by which he could justify to himself
the step down in the world which the old Duke had proposed to him.

Early on the following morning he left Carlton Terrace on foot and
walked as far as Mr. Monk's house, which was close to St. James's
Street. Here at eleven o'clock he found his late Chancellor of the
Exchequer in that state of tedious agitation in which a man is kept
who does not yet know whether he is or is not to be one of the actors
in the play just about to be performed. The Duke had never before
been in Mr. Monk's very humble abode, and now caused some surprise.
Mr. Monk knew that he might probably be sent for, but had not
expe