could appoint bishops, and make peers, and give away ribbons.
But he couldn't pass a law, and certainly continued to hold his
present uncomfortable position by no will of his own. But a
Prime Minister cannot escape till he has succeeded in finding a
successor; and though the successor be found and consents to make
an attempt, the old unfortunate cannot be allowed to go free when
the attempt is shown to be a failure. He has not absolutely
given up the keys of his boxes, and no one will take them from
him. Even a sovereign can abdicate; but the Prime Minister of a
constitutional government is in bonds. The reader may therefore
understand that the Duchess was asking her husband what place
among the political rulers of the country had been offered to him
by the last aspirant to the leadership of the Government.

But the reader should understand more than this, and may perhaps
do so, if he has ever seen those former chronicles to which
allusion has been made. The Duke, before he became a duke, had
held very high office, having been the Chancellor of the
Exchequer. When he was transferred, perforce, to the House of
Lords, he had,--as it is not uncommon in such cases,--accepted
a lower political station. This had displeased the Duchess, who
was ambitious both on her own behalf and that of her lord,--and
who thought that a Duke of Omnium should be nothing in the
Government if not at any rate near the top. But after that, with
the simple and single object of doing some special piece of work
for the nation,--something which he fancied that nobody else
would do if he didn't do it,--his Grace, of his own motion, at
his own solicitation, had encountered further official
degradation, very much to the disgust of the Duchess. And it was
not the way with her Grace to hide such sorrows in the depth of