o Drought,--that the Prime
Minister's wife, who was great in hospitality, would not admit the
First Lord of the Admiralty into her house. The doings at Gatherum
Castle, and in Carlton Terrace, and at the Horns were watched much
too closely by the world at large to allow such omissions to be
otherwise than conspicuous. Since the commencement of the Session
there had been a series of articles in the "People's Banner"
violently abusive of the Prime Minister, and in one or two of these
the indecency of these exclusions had been exposed with great
strength of language. And the Editor of the "People's Banner" had
discovered that Sir Orlando Drought was the one man in Parliament fit
to rule the nation. Till Parliament should discover this fact, or at
least acknowledge it,--the discovery having been happily made by the
"People's Banner,"--the Editor of the "People's Banner" thought that
there could be no hope for the country. Sir Orlando of course saw
all these articles, and in his very heart believed that a man had
at length sprung up among them fit to conduct a newspaper. The Duke
also unfortunately saw the "People's Banner." In his old happy days
two papers a day, one in the morning and the other before dinner,
sufficed to tell him all that he wanted to know. Now he felt it
necessary to see almost every rag that was published. And he would
skim through them all till he found the lines in which he himself
was maligned, and then, with sore heart and irritated nerves, would
pause over every contumelious word. He would have bitten his tongue
out rather than have spoken of the tortures he endured, but he was
tortured and did endure. He knew the cause of the bitter personal
attacks made on him,--of the abuse with which he was loaded, and of
the ridicule, infinitely more painful to him, with which his wife's
social splendour was bespattered. He remembered well the attempt
which Mr. Quintus Slide had made to obtain an entrance into his
house, and his own scornful rejection of that gentleman's overtures.
He knew,--no man knew better,--the real value of that able Editor's
opinion. And yet every word of it was gall and wormwood to him. In
every paragraph there was a scourge which hit him on the raw and
opened wounds which he could show to no kind surgeon, for which he
could find solace in no friendly treatment. Not even to his wife
could he condescend to say that Mr. Quintus Slide had hurt him.

Then Sir Orlando had come himself. Sir