And now will the Muses¹ assist me while I sing an altogether new song? On the Tuesday the Cabinet met at the First Lord’s official residence in Downing Street, and I will attempt to describe what, according to the bewildered brain of a poor fictionist, was said or might have been said, what was done or might have been done, on so august an occasion.

The poor fictionist very frequently finds himself to have been wrong in his description of things in general, and is told so, roughly by the critics, and tenderly by the friends of his bosom². He is moved to tell of things of which he omits to learn the nature before he tells of them — as should be done by a strictly³ honest fictionist. He catches salmon⁴ 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 meshes⁵ 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 steer⁶ 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 benevolent⁷ pilot will, indeed, now and again give a poor fictionist a helping⁸ hand — not used, however, generally, with much discretion⁹. 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.

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