“Men who breakfast out are generally Liberals,” says Lady St. Julians in Sybil.  “Have not you observed that?”

“I wonder why?”

“It shows a restless, revolutionary mind,” said Lady Firebrace, “that can settle to nothing, but must be running after gossip the moment they are awake.”

“Yes,” said Lady St. Julians, “I think those men who breakfast out, or who give breakfasts, are generally dangerous characters; at least I would not trust them.”

And Lady St. Julians’s doctrine, though half a century old, applies with perfect exactness to those enemies of the human race who endeavour to keep alive or to resuscitate this desperate tradition.  Juvenal described the untimely fate of the man who went into his bath with an undigested peacock in his system.  Scarcely pleasanter are the sensations of the Minister or the M.P. who goes from a breakfast-party, full of buttered muffins and broiled salmon, to the sedentary desk-work of his office or the fusty wrangles of a Grand Committee.

Breakfast over, the Minister’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of exercise.  If he is a man of active habits and strenuous tastes, he may take a gentle breather up Highgate Hill, like Mr. Gladstone, or play tennis, like Sir Edward Grey.  Lord Spencer when in office might be seen any morning cantering up St. James’s Street on a hack, or pounding round Hyde Park in high naval debate with Sir Ughtred Kay-Shuttleworth.  Lord Rosebery drives himself in a cab; Mr. Asquith is driven; both occasionally survey the riding world over the railings of Rotten Row; and even Lord Salisbury may be found prowling about the Green Park, to which his house in Arlington Street has a private access.  Mr. Balfour, as we all know, is a devotee of the cycle, and his example is catching; but Mr. Chamberlain holds fast to the soothing belief that, when a man has walked upstairs to bed, he has made as much demand on his physical energies as is good for him, and that exercise was invented by the doctors in order to bring grist to their mill.

Whichever of these examples our Minister prefers to follow, his exercise or his lounge must be over by 12 o’clock.  The Grand Committees meet at that hour; on Wednesday the House meets then; and if he is not required by departmental business to attend either the Committee or the House, he will probably be at his office by midday.  The exterior aspect of the Government Offices in Whitehall is sufficiently well known, and any peculiarities which it may present are referable to the fact that the execution of an Italian design was entrusted by the wisdom of Parliament to a Gothic architect.  Inside, their leading characteristics are the abundance and steepness of the stairs, the total absence of light, and an atmosphere densely charged with Irish stew.  Why the servants of the British Government should live exclusively on this delicacy, and why its odours should prevail with equal pungency “from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve,” are matters of speculation too recondite for popular handling.