Prime
Ministers, Mr. Gresham and Mr. Daubeny. There were certain men,
nominally belonging to this or to the other party, who would
certainly within a week of the nomination of a Cabinet in the House,
oppose the Cabinet which they ought to support. Mr. Daubeny had
been in power,--nay, was in power, though he had twice resigned. Mr.
Gresham had been twice sent for to Windsor, and had on one occasion
undertaken and on another had refused to undertake to form a
Ministry. Mr. Daubeny had tried two or three combinations, and had
been at his wits' end. He was no doubt still in power,--could appoint
bishops, and make peers, and give away ribbons. But he couldn't pass
a law, and certainly continued to hold his present uncomfortable
position by no will of his own. But a Prime Minister cannot escape
till he has succeeded in finding a successor; and though the
successor be found and consents to make an attempt, the old
unfortunate cannot be allowed to go free when that attempt is shown
to be a failure. He has not absolutely given up the keys of his
boxes, and no one will take them from him. Even a sovereign can
abdicate; but the Prime Minister of a constitutional government
is in bonds. The reader may therefore understand that the Duchess
was asking her husband what place among the political rulers of
the country had been offered to him by the last aspirant to the
leadership of the Government.

But the reader should understand more than this, and may perhaps do
so, if he has ever seen those former chronicles to which allusion
has been made. The Duke, before he became a duke, had held very
high office, having been Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he was
transferred, perforce, to the House of Lords, he had,--as is not
uncommon in such cases,--accepted a lower political station. This had
displeased the Duchess, who was ambitious both on her own behalf and
that of her lord,--and who thought that a Duke of Omnium should be
nothing in the Government if not at any rate near the top. But after
that, with the simple and single object of doing some special piece
of work for the nation,--something which he fancied that nobody else
would do if he didn't do it,--his Grace, of his own motion, at his
own solicitation, had encountered further official degradation, very
much to the disgust of the Duchess. And it was not the way with her
Grace to hide such sorrows in the depth of her bosom. When affronted
she would speak out, whether to her husba