eing careful that he should learn what that
price is. Your policy should be to keep your government together by a
strong majority. After all, the making of new laws is too often but
an unfortunate necessity laid on us by the impatience of the people.
A lengthened period of quiet and therefore good government with a
minimum of new laws would be the greatest benefit the country could
receive. When I recommended you to comply with the Queen's behest I
did so because I thought that you might inaugurate such a period more
certainly than any other one man." This old Duke was quite content
with a state of things such as he described. He had been a Cabinet
Minister for more than half his life. He liked being a Cabinet
Minister. He thought it well for the country generally that his party
should be in power,--and if not his party in its entirety, then as
much of his party as might be possible. He did not expect to be
written of as a Pitt or a Somers, but he thought that memoirs would
speak of him as a useful nobleman,--and he was contented. He was
not only not ambitious himself, but the effervescence and general
turbulence of ambition in other men was distasteful to him. Loyalty
was second nature to him, and the power of submitting to defeat
without either shame or sorrow had become perfect with him by
long practice. He would have made his brother Duke such as he was
himself,--had not his brother Duke been so lamentably thin-skinned.

"I suppose we must try it for another Session?" said the Duke of
Omnium with a lachrymose voice.

"Of course we must,--and for others after that, I both hope and
trust," said the Duke of St. Bungay, getting up. "If I don't go
up-stairs I shall be late, and then her Grace will look at me with
unforgiving eyes."

On the following day after lunch the Prime Minister took a walk with
Lady Rosina De Courcy. He had fallen into a habit of walking with
Lady Rosina almost every day of his life, till the people in the
Castle began to believe that Lady Rosina was the mistress of some
deep policy of her own. For there were many there who did in truth
think that statecraft could never be absent from a minister's mind,
day or night. But in truth Lady Rosina chiefly made herself agreeable
to the Prime Minister by never making any most distant allusion
to public affairs. It might be doubted whether she even knew that
the man who paid her so much honour was the Head of the British
Government as well as the Duke o