nds of the minister, who hesitates not to account
for them as national predilections, like the taste for strong ale and
underdone beef.

He is a proud man, indeed, who puts his foot upon the Continent with
that Aladdin's lamp--a letter to the ambassador. The credit of his
banker is, in his eyes, very inferior to that all-powerful document,
which opens to his excited imagination the salons of royalty, the dinner
table of the embassy, a private box at the opera, and the attentions
of the whole fashionable world; and he revels in the expectation of
crosses, cordons, stars, and decorations--private interviews with
royalty, ministerial audiences, and all the thousand and one flatteries,
which are heaped upon the highest of the land. If he is single, he
doesn't know but he may marry a princess; if he be married, he may have
a daughter for some German archduke, with three hussars for an army, and
three acres of barren mountain for a territory--whose subjects are not
so numerous as the hairs of his moustache, but whose quarterings go back
to Noah; and an ark on a "field azure" figures in his escutcheon. Well,
well! of all the expectations of mankind these are about the vainest.
These foreign-office documents are but Bellerophon letters,--born to
betray. Let not their possession dissuade you from making a weekly score
with your hotel-keeper, under the pleasant delusion that you are to dine
out, four days, out of the seven. Alas and alack! the ambassador doesn't
keep open-house for his rapparee countrymen: his hotel is no shelter for
females, destitute of any correct idea as to where they are going, and
why; and however strange it may seem, he actually seems to think his
dwelling as much his own, as though it stood in Belgrave-square, or
Piccadilly.

Now, John Bull has no notion of this--he pays for these people--they
figure in the budget, and for a good round sum, too--and what do they
do for it? John knows little of the daily work of diplomacy. A treaty,
a tariff, a question of war, he can understand; but the red-tapery of
office, he can make nothing of. Court gossip, royal marriages--how his
Majesty smiled at the French envoy, and only grinned at the Austrian
_charge d'affaires_--how the queen spoke three minutes to the
Danish minister's wife, and only said "_Bon jour, madame_," to the
Neapolitan's--how plum-pudding figured at the royal table, thus showing
that English policy was in the ascendant;---all these signs of the
ti