So here we are again among our old friends.  We should have good reason to complain had Dunsford, Ellesmere, or Milverton been absent; and here they are again just as before.  Possibly they are even less changed than they’should have been after thirteen or fourteen years, considering what their age was at our first introduction to them.  Dunsford, the elderly country parson, once fellow and tutor of his college, still reports the conversations of the friends; Milverton and Ellesmere are, in their own way, as fond of one another as ever; Dunsford is still judicious, kind, good, somewhat slow, as country parsons not unnaturally become; Ellesmere is still sarcastic, keen, clever, with much real worldly wisdom and much affected cynicism overlying a kind and honest heart.  As for Milverton, we should judge that in him the author of the work has unconsciously shown us himself; for assuredly the great characteristics of the author of Friends in Council must be that he is laborious, thoughtful, generous, well-read, much in earnest, eager for the welfare of his fellow-men, deeply interested in politics and in history, impatient of puritanical restraints, convinced of the substantial importance of amusement.  Milverton, we gather, still lives at his country-seat in Hampshire, and takes some interest in rustic concerns.  Ellesmere continues to rise at the bar; since we last met him has been Solicitor-General, and is now Sir John, a member of the House of Commons, and in the fair way to a Chief Justiceship.  The clergyman’s quiet life is going on as before.  But in addition to our three old friends we find an elderly man, one Mr. Midhurst, whose days have been spent in diplomacy, who is of a melancholy disposition, and takes gloomy views of life, but who is much skilled in cookery, very fat, and very fond of a good dinner.  Also Mildred and Blanche, Milverton’s cousins, two sisters, have grown up into young women of very different character:  and they take some share in the conversations, and, as we shall hereafter see, a still more important part in the action of the story.  We feel that we are in the midst of a real group of actual human beings:—­just what third-rate historians fail to make us feel when telling us of men and women who have actually lived.  The time and place are very varied; hut through the greater portion of the book the party are travelling over the Continent.  A further variation from the plan of the former volumes, besides the introduction of new characters, is, that while all the essays in the preceding series were written by Milverton, we have now one by Ellesmere, one by Dunsford, and one by Mr. Midhurst, each being in theme and manner very characteristic of its author.  But, as heretofore, the writer of the book holds to his principle of the impolicy of ’jading anything too far,’ and thinks with Bacon that ’it is good, in discourse and speech of conversation, to vary and intermingle speech of the present occasion with arguments, tales with reasons, asking of questions