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 Mr. Mildmay, and of being duly submissive to one whom he recognises as his superior.

Within two minutes afterwards the Duke followed, with Plantagenet Palliser.  The Duke, as all the world knows, was the Duke of St. Bungay, the very front and head of the aristocratic old Whigs of the country,—­a man who has been thrice spoken of as Prime Minister, and who really might have filled the office had he not known himself to be unfit for it.  The Duke has been consulted as to the making of Cabinets for the last five-and-thirty years, and is even now not an old man in appearance;—­a fussy, popular, clever, conscientious man, whose digestion has been too good to make politics a burden to him, but who has thought seriously about his country, and is one who will be sure to leave memoirs behind him.  He was born in the semi-purple of ministerial influences, and men say of him that he is honester than his uncle, who was Canning’s friend, but not so great a man as his grandfather, with whom Fox once quarrelled, and whom Burke loved.  Plantagenet Palliser, himself the heir to a dukedom, was the young Chancellor of the Exchequer, of whom some statesmen thought much as the rising star of the age.  If industry, rectitude of purpose, and a certain clearness of intellect may prevail, Planty Pall, as he is familiarly called, may become a great Minister.

Then came Viscount Thrift by himself;—­the First Lord of the Admiralty, with the whole weight of a new iron-clad fleet upon his shoulders.  He has undertaken the Herculean task of cleansing the dockyards,—­and with it the lesser work of keeping afloat a navy that may be esteemed by his countrymen to be the best in the world.  And he thinks that he will do both, if only Mr. Mildmay will not resign;—­an industrious, honest, self-denying nobleman, who works without ceasing from morn to night, and who hopes to rise in time to high things,—­to the translating of Homer, perhaps, and the wearing of the Garter.