Bonteen. These things, no doubt, were said,--but
more was said also. It was thought that he should not have gone to
an office which had been rendered vacant by the murder of a man
who had been placed there merely to assist himself. If the present
arrangement was good, why should it not have been made independently
of Mr. Bonteen? Questions were asked about it in both Houses, and the
transfer no doubt did have the effect of lowering the man in the
estimation of the political world. He himself felt that he did not
stand so high with his colleagues as when he was Chancellor of the
Exchequer; not even so high as when he held the Privy Seal. In the
printed lists of those who attended the Cabinets his name generally
was placed last, and an opponent on one occasion thought, or
pretended to think, that he was no more than Postmaster-General. He
determined to bear all this without wincing,--but he did wince. He
would not own to himself that he had been wrong, but he was sore,--as
a man is sore who doubts about his own conduct; and he was not the
less so because he strove to bear his wife's sarcasms without showing
that they pained him.
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