He took everything in good part, was not over-talkative, over-pushing, or presumptuous; he felt no strong bias of his own; had at his fingers' ends the cant phraseology of ministerial subordinates, and knew how to make himself useful.

He knew also--a knowledge much more difficult to acquire--how to live among men so as never to make himself disagreeable.
But then he could not be trusted! True.

But how many men in his walk of life can be trusted?
And those who can--at how terribly high a price do they rate their own fidelity! How often must a minister be forced to confess to himself that he cannot afford to employ good faith! Undy Scott, therefore, from time to time, received some ministerial bone, some Civil Service scrap of victuals thrown to him from the Government table, which, if it did not suffice to maintain him in all the comforts of a Treasury career, still preserved for him a connexion with the Elysium of public life; gave him, as it were, a link by which he could hang on round the outer corners of the State's temple, and there watch with advantage till the doors of Paradise should be re-opened to him.

He was no Lucifer, who, having wilfully rebelled against the high majesty of Heaven, was doomed to suffer for ever in unavailing, but still proud misery, the penalties of his asserted independence; but a poor Peri, who had made a lapse and thus forfeited, for a while, celestial joys, and was now seeking for some welcome offering, striving to perform some useful service, by which he might regain his lost glory.
The last of the good things thus tendered to him was not yet all consumed.

When Mr.Hardlines, now Sir Gregory, was summoned to assist at, or rather preside over, the deliberations of the committee which was to organize a system of examination for the Civil Service, the Hon.