He
catches salmon in October; or shoots his partridges in March. His
dahlias bloom in June, and his birds sing in the autumn. He opens the
opera-houses before Easter, and makes Parliament sit on a Wednesday
evening. And then those terrible meshes of the Law! How is a
fictionist, in these excited days, to create the needed biting
interest without legal difficulties; and how again is he to steer his
little bark clear of so many rocks,--when the rocks and the shoals
have been purposely arranged to make the taking of a pilot on board a
necessity? As to those law meshes, a benevolent pilot will, indeed,
now and again give a poor fictionist a helping hand,--not used,
however, generally, with much discretion. But from whom is any
assistance to come in the august matter of a Cabinet assembly? There
can be no such assistance. No man can tell aught but they who will
tell nothing. But then, again, there is this safety, that let the
story be ever so mistold,--let the fiction be ever so far removed
from the truth, no critic short of a Cabinet Minister himself can
convict the narrator of error.
It was a large dingy room, covered with a Turkey carpet, and
containing a dark polished mahogany dinner-table, on very heavy
carved legs, which an old messenger was preparing at two o'clock in
the day for the use of her Majesty's Ministers.
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