de Blowitz has done all that he intended to do. He has nipped in the bud this or that diplomatic scheme; he has anticipated some subsequent further revelation; or it may be he has laid the net for some other and less wary diplomatist. The diplomatists themselves are not so incredulous. They listen to what M. de Blowitz is saying with a more respectful attention, and, thinking discretion the better part of valor, they usually end in bringing their mite to his universal diplomatic bureau. Upon his discretion they know they can count. Here is a fact in point. Breakfasting once in Paris with an amiable lady and a very distinguished diplomatist who was also a poet, the conversation fell on the subject of M. de Blowitz and Count Munster who had recently been the object of a long-resounding letter in the "Times." The diplomatist who sat opposite me spoke freely of the Munster episode, which was then entertaining the whole of Europe, save the person most concerned. "M. de Blowitz," said he, "is our only peer. But there should be honor even among thieves. He has 'cooked Count Munster's goose.'" "Yes," I replied, "but with fuel of Count Munster's own providing." "Quite so," he continued; "but of course we are paid to deny just such things as this. And I have heard of licensed jesters, but the world has come to a pretty pass if we are to be at the mercy of licensed truth-tellers. What will become, this side of the Orient, of our profession?" "I agree with you," interrupted our host; "but what does it matter so only diplomacy may be the bay-leaves of poets, and you may have time to take the world into your confidence in verse?" This estimate, implied in the ambassador's somewhat cynical words, has always been shared by all M. de Blowitz's _confreres_. It would be more than amusing, it would be curiously instructive, to corroborate this anecdote by comparison with the hundred others that tremble in the ink of my pen. But fortunately it is many years before "Blowitziana" will be written, while now there are Hawaii and Panama and the Papal ambassador to the United States to occupy our attention. Yet because of the existence of just this assurance in the foreign offices of all the European powers, it seems necessary to set the average reader on his guard against a natural error. What it all comes to is this--M. Jules Simon has said it--"Newspapers are better served than kings and peoples."