new Cabinet about to be formed by the powerful leader of the Opposition. All the idle men in London rushed to their clubs, and such high betting had not been known since the last Epsom races.
After three days of wonderment, the King decided the bets by sending for Mr. G. The clubs were more thronged and more agitated than ever. One-half of St. James's Street said that England was lost, that the real crisis had come at last (there is generally a false crisis every Easter, in which England is all but lost, but she is found again towards Whitsuntide), and that Church and State, King and kingdom, Lords and Commons, were all to be knocked on the head at once. The club on the opposition side of the street was in ecstasies; its members shook each other by the hand till their arms ached; they declared the King to be the wisest monarch that had ever reigned, and Mr. G. the greatest statesman that had ever governed; that the country was saved, and revolution arrested. They met but to rejoice over the public good, and parted but to make private offers of their services to Mr. G.
And Fisherwick! how felt he? Never was there so happy a man; the world was not large enough to contain him, nothing was but the great room in Downing Street, which to him was greater than the world itself He wrote faster than ever, and his adoration of his chief was yet more fervent; and when the list of the new ministry was drawn up by his own hand for the favoured evening paper, and when he had added thereto a paragraph announcing that Samuel Obadiah Fisherwick, Esq., had been appointed private secretary to the new premier, he felt that life had nothing greater to give. He had reached the summit of his Mont Blanc.
Mr. G.'s first measure was a dissolution of parliament. The roads swarmed with carriages, and the papers with addresses, the dying hatreds of former contests were roused
