whole supremacy of woman, with the whole homage of the heart of man.

A change in the British cabinet, by the death of one of its leading
members, now produced a change in the viceroyalty; and the charge of the
government, during the interregnum, necessarily devolved on the
secretary. I never felt business more irksome than at this juncture, and
I had, more than once, grave thoughts of casting aside the staff of
office in spite of all its gilding, withdrawing from the disturbances of
public life, and, with Clotilde at my side, finding some quiet corner of
England, or the earth, where we might sit under our own vine and our own
fig-tree, and forget revolutions and court-days for the rest of our
lives.

But against this my young and lovely partner protested, with all the
spirit of her ancestry; declaring that, though nothing would give her
more unfeigned delight than to quit courts and cities, and fashion and
fetes, for ever, if I quitted them along with her--she could not endure
the thought of my allowing "the talents which nature had given to me,
and the opportunities which had been so liberally offered by fortune,"
to perish useless to the world. I had no answer to offer but that I had
made her the arbitress of my fate, and she was welcome to do with me as
was her sovereign will. Accordingly I left her, looking like Hebe in her
bower, to plunge into a chaos of undecipherable papers, to be deafened
with a thousand impossible applications, to marshal lazy departments, to
reform antiquated abuses, and, after spending twelve hours a-day in the
dust and gloom of official duty, to spend nearly as many hours of the
night battling with arrogant and angry faction in the House of Commons.

But this toil, like most other toils, had its fruits; it gave me an
extraordinary increase of public influence, and that influence produced,
in the natural course of such things, an extraordinary crop of
adherents. If I could have drunk adulation, no man was in more imminent
hazard of mystifying his own brains. I began to be spoken of as one
equal to the highest affairs of the state, and to whom the viceroyalty
itself lay naturally open. But I still longed for a return to England.
Delighted as I was with the grace of the higher ranks, amused with the
perpetual whim and eccentricity of the lower, and feeling that general
attachment to Ireland which every man not disqualified by loss of
character must feel, my proper position was in that countr