Note 151 — Chapter V

Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal are very prone to puns. When Lord Campbell replaced Lord Plunket as Chancellor of Ireland he had to cross the Channel in a storm. Plunket's secretary remarked that if the new Chancellor were not drowned, he would be very sick. "Perhaps," said Plunket, "he'll throw up the seals!" Lord Chancellor Westbury once told an eminent counsel that he was getting as fat as a porpoise. "In that case," replied the other, "I am evidently a fit companion of the great Seal." Lord Lyndhurst is another Chancellor who made a joke of this sort. There must be something, too, in the atmosphere of a change of Ministry which evokes bad puns. When Disraeli was appointed to Lord Derby's Cabinet in 1852, more than one eminent politician facetiously remarked that now Benjamin's mess would be five times as great as that of the others. And, fourteen years later, when the same statesman was bidden to form a Ministry of his own, Lord Chelmsford, whom he had relieved of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, shamelessly observed that if the old Government was "the Derby," this new one was certainly "the Hoax" (see Martin's "Life of Lyndhurst," p. 481 n., and the "Life of Lord Granville," vol. i. p. 479, etc.).