the diplomatic line without a certain degree of diplomatic information. I
have pointed this out to you often; you have neglected to make yourself
master of these things, and, for want of them in office, you will come, I
fear, some day or other to shame."

"Do not be afraid of that--no danger of my coming to shame any more than
a thousand other people in office, who never trouble themselves about
diplomatic information, and all that. There is always some clerk who knows
the forms, and with those, and looking for what one wants upon the spur
of the occasion in books and pamphlets, and so forth, one may go on very
well--if one does but know how to keep one's own counsel. You see I got
through with Lord Oldborough to-day--"

"Ay--but I assure you I trembled for you, and I could have squeezed myself
into an auger-hole once, when you blundered about that treaty of which I
knew that you knew nothing."

"Oh! sir, I assure you I had turned over the leaves. I was correct enough
as to the dates; and, suppose I blundered, as my brother Buckhurst says,
half the world never know what they are saying, and the other half never
find it out.--Why, sir, you were telling me the other night such a blunder
of Prince Potemkin's--"

"Very true," interrupted the commissioner; "but you are not Prince
Potemkin, nor yet a prime minister; if you were, no matter how little you
knew--you might get other people to supply your deficiencies. But now,
in your place, and in the course of making your way upwards, you will be
called upon to supply _others_ with the information they may want. And you
know I shall not be always at your elbow; therefore I really am afraid--"