of bringing over more converts, and therefore
Richard Waverley met with a share of ministerial favour more than
proportioned to his talents or his political importance. It was however,
discovered that he had respectable talents for public business, and the
first admittance to the minister's levee being negotiated, his success
became rapid. Sir Everard learned from the public NEWS-LETTER,--first,
that Richard Waverley, Esquire, was returned for the ministerial borough
of Barterfaith; next, that Richard Waverley, Esquire, had taken a
distinguished part in the debate upon the Excise bill in the support
of government; and, lastly, that Richard Waverley, Esquire, had been
honoured with a seat at one of those boards, where the pleasure of
serving the country is combined with other important gratifications,
which, to render them the more acceptable, occur regularly once a
quarter.

Although these events followed each other so closely that the sagacity
of the editor of a modern newspaper would have presaged the last two
even while he announced the first, yet they came upon Sir Everard
gradually, and drop by drop, as it were, distilled through the cool and
procrastinating alembic of DYER'S WEEKLY LETTER. [Long the oracle of the
country gentlemen of the high Tory party. The ancient NEWS-LETTER was
written in manuscript and copied by clerks, who addressed the copies to
the subscribers. The politician by whom they were compiled picked up
his intelligence at coffee-houses, and often pleaded for an additional
gratuity, in consideration of the extra expense attached to frequenting
such places of fashionable resort.] For it may be observed in passing,
that instead of those mail-coaches, by means of which every mechanic at
his sixpenny club may nightly learn from twenty contradictory channels
the yesterday's news of the capital, a weekly post brought, in those
days, to Waverley-Honour, a WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER, which, after it had
gratified Sir Everard's curiosity, his sister's, and that of his aged
butler, was regularly transferred from the Hall to the Rectory, from
the Rectory to Squire Stubbs' at the Grange, from the Squire to the
Baronet's steward at his neat white house on the heath, from the steward
to the bailiff, and from him through a huge circle of honest dames and
gaffers, by whose hard and horny hands it was generally worn to pieces
in about a month after its arrival.

This slow succession of intelligence was of some advantag