The House cheered very loudly, and Mr.Boffin was the hero of ten minutes.

Mr.Daubeny detracted something from this triumph by the overstrained and perhaps ironic pathos with which he deplored the loss of his right honourable friend's services.

Now this right honourable gentleman had never been specially serviceable.
But the wonder of the world arose from the fact that only two gentlemen out of the twenty or thirty who composed the Government did give up their places on this occasion.

And this was a Conservative Government! With what a force of agony did all the Ratlers of the day repeat that inappropriate name! Conservatives! And yet they were ready to abandon the Church at the bidding of such a man as Mr.
Daubeny! Ratler himself almost felt that he loved the Church.

Only two resignations;--whereas it had been expected that the whole House would fall to pieces! Was it possible that these earls, that marquis, and the two dukes, and those staunch old Tory squires, should remain in a Government pledged to disestablish the Church?
Was all the honesty, all the truth of the great party confined to the bosoms of Mr.Boffin and Lord Drummond?
Doubtless they were all Esaus; but would they sell their great birthright for so very small a mess of pottage?
The parsons in the country, and the little squires who but rarely come up to London, spoke of it all exactly as did the Ratlers.
There were parishes in the country in which Mr.Boffin was canonised, though up to that date no Cabinet Minister could well have been less known to fame than was Mr.Boffin.
What would those Liberals do who would naturally rejoice in the disestablishment of the Church,--those members of the Lower House, who had always spoken of the ascendancy of Protestant episcopacy with the bitter acrimony of exclusion?
After all, the success or failure of Mr.Daubeny must depend, not on his own party, but on them.
It must always be so when measures of Reform are advocated by a Conservative Ministry.