his wife and his Private Secretary.  The wives of official men are not always as trustworthy as Mrs. Bucket in Bleak House, and some of the Private Secretaries in the Government of 1880 were little more than boys.  Two members of that Cabinet were notorious for their free communications to the press, and it was often remarked that the Birmingham Daily Post was peculiarly well informed.  A noble Lord who held a high office, and who, though the most pompous, was not the wisest of mankind, was habitually a victim to a certain journalist of known enterprise, who used to waylay him outside Downing Street and accost him with jaunty confidence:  “Well, Lord——­, so you have settled on so-and-so after all?” The noble lord, astonished that the Cabinet’s decision was already public property, would reply, “As you know so much, there can be no harm in telling the rest”; and the journalist, grinning like a dog, ran off to print the precious morsel in a special edition of the Millbank Gazette.  Mr. Justin McCarthy could, I believe, tell a curious story of a highly important piece of foreign intelligence communicated by a Minister to the Daily News; of a resulting question in the House of Commons; and of the same Minister’s emphatic declaration that no effort should be wanting to trace this violator of official confidence and bring him to condign punishment.

While it is true that outsiders sometimes become possessed by these dodges of official secrets, it is not less true that Cabinet Ministers are often curiously in the dark about great and even startling events.  A political lady once said to me, “Do you in your party think much of my neighbour, Mr. ——?” As in duty bound, I replied, “Oh yes, a great deal.”  She rejoined, “I shouldn’t have thought it, for when the boys are shouting any startling news in the special editions, I see him run out without his hat to buy an evening paper.  That doesn’t look well for a Cabinet Minister.”  On the fatal 6th of May 1882 I dined in company with Mr. Bright.  He stayed late, but never heard a word of the murders which had taken place that evening in the Phoenix Park; went off quietly to bed, and read them as news in the next morning’s Observer.

But, after all, attendance at the Cabinet, though a most important, is only an occasional, event in the life of one of her Majesty’s Ministers.  Let us consider the ordinary routine of his day’s work during the session of Parliament.  The truly virtuous Minister, we may presume, struggles down to the dining room to read prayers and to breakfast in the bosom of his family between 9 and 10 A.M.  But the self-indulgent bachelor declines to be called, and sleeps his sleep out.  Mr. Arthur Balfour invariably breakfasts at 12; and more politicians than would admit it consume their tea and toast in bed.  Mercifully, the dreadful habit of giving breakfast-parties, though sanctioned by the memories of Holland and Macaulay and Rogers and Houghton, virtually died out with the disappearance of Mr. Gladstone.