literature of the stage at the finger-ends of their straw-colored
gloves. They had a pretty large acquaintance with actors and actresses,
and were perfect Walpoladi in the minor scandals of the day. To do them
justice, however, they were not indifferent to the more masculine
knowledge necessary in "this wrong world." They talked as familiarly of
the real actors of life as of the sham ones. They could adjust to a
hair the rival pretensions of contending statesmen. They did not
profess to be deep in the mysteries of foreign cabinets (with the
exception of one young gentleman connected with the Foreign Office, who
prided himself on knowing exactly what the Russians meant to do with
India--when they got it); but, to make amends, the majority of them had
penetrated the closest secrets of our own. It is true that, according
to a proper subdivision of labor, each took some particular member of
the government for his special observation; just as the most skilful
surgeons, however profoundly versed in the general structure of our
frame, rest their anatomical fame on the light they throw on particular
parts of it,--one man taking the brain, another the duodenum, a third
the spinal cord, while a fourth, perhaps, is a master of all the
symptoms indicated by a pensile finger. Accordingly, one of my friends
appropriated to himself the Home Department; another the Colonies; and a
third, whom we all regarded as a future Talleyrand (or a De Retz at
least), had devoted himself to the special study of Sir Robert Peel, and
knew, by the way in which that profound and inscrutable statesman threw
open his coat, every thought that was passing in his breast! Whether
lawyers or officials, they all had a great idea of themselves,--high
notions of what they were to be, rather than what they were to do, some
day. As the king of modern fine gentlemen said to himself, in
paraphrase of Voltaire, "They had letters in their pockets addressed to
Posterity,--which the chances were, however, that they might forget to
deliver." Somewhat "priggish" most of them might be; but, on the whole,