counsels.

Very shortly there was heard the ring of various voices in the
passages,--the voices of men speaking pleasantly, the voices of men
with whom it seemed, from their tone, that things were doing well
in the world. And then a cluster of four or five gentlemen entered
the room. At first sight they seemed to be as ordinary gentlemen as
you shall meet anywhere about Pall Mall on an afternoon. There was
nothing about their outward appearance of the august wiggery of
statecraft, nothing of the ponderous dignity of ministerial position.
That little man in the square-cut coat,--we may almost call it a
shooting-coat,--swinging an umbrella and wearing no gloves, is no
less a person than the Lord Chancellor,--Lord Weazeling,--who made
a hundred thousand pounds as Attorney-General, and is supposed
to be the best lawyer of his age. He is fifty, but he looks to
be hardly over forty, and one might take him to be, from his
appearance,--perhaps a clerk in the War Office, well-to-do, and
popular among his brother-clerks. Immediately with him is Sir Harry
Coldfoot, also a lawyer by profession, though he has never practised.
He has been in the House for nearly thirty years, and is now at the
Home Office. He is a stout, healthy, grey-haired gentleman, who
certainly does not wear the cares of office on his face. Perhaps,
however, no minister gets more bullied than he by the press, and men
say that he will be very willing to give up to some political enemy
the control of the police, and the onerous duty of judging in all
criminal appeals. Behind these come our friend Mr. Monk, young Lord
Cantrip from the colonies next door, than whom no smarter young peer
now does honour to our hereditary legislature, and Sir Marmaduke
Morecombe, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Why Sir
Marmaduke has always been placed in Mr. Mildmay's Cabinets nobody
ever knew. As Chancellor of the Duchy he has nothing to do,--and were
there anything, he would not do it. He rarely speaks in the House,
and then does not speak well. He is a handsome man, or would be but
for an assumption of grandeur in the carriage of his eyes, giving to
his face a character of pomposity which he himself well deserves. He
was in the Guards when young, and has been in Parliament since he
ceased to be young. It must be supposed that Mr. Mildmay has found
something in him, for he has been included in three successive
liberal Cabinets. He has probably the virtue of being true to