It was Palmer’s misfortune to go to the Post Office at a time when these gilded figureheads were not perhaps more efficient, but certainly more interfering, than the generality, and, being himself hot-headed and impatient of control, he very soon came to disagreement from them. Their suggestions he at first haughtily ignored, as in his opinion likely to injure his plans, and when those suggestions became commands, he entirely disobeyed them. The chiefs with whom he thus came into bitter conflict were at first Lords Carteret and Walsingham: the former a “job-master,” as Palmer satirically styled him, of peculiar shamelessness and audacity; his colleague a man of probity, but with something of the formal prig in his constitution that irritated Palmer at last beyond endurance. Walsingham made a point of investigating everything. He may not have been a better man of business than Palmer, but he was a man of orderly methods, which Palmer was not. Palmer did things well, but in an unbusinesslike way; Walsingham must for ever be seeking precedents, calling for vouchers, and insisting upon official etiquette. All this was very poisonous to the new Comptroller-General, who found himself largely controlled instead of controlling. Carteret, being convicted by his colleague of a job, Palmer hotly thought his own honesty questioned when careless and unreported appointments solely on his own initiative were resented by his official superior. Thus affairs continued through six years of changes, in which Postmasters-General succeeded one another and returned like the changes of a kaleidoscope. But while other Postmasters disappeared, Walsingham, the stickler for form, remained. With others Palmer might have found some way of compromise, but with Walsingham he could not do other than carry on a struggle for mastery. The end came when that peer had for his fellow the Earl of Chesterfield, who possessed sufficient humour by himself to be amused with Palmer’s frettings against authority, but in conjunction with Walsingham could only follow his lead. Annoyed beyond his own powers of control (which, to be sure, were very limited) by the action of the joint Postmasters in referring to the Treasury an affair which he conceived to be a purely Post Office matter, concerning the mileage to be paid for the Carlisle and Portpatrick mail, Palmer forthwith suddenly stopped on his own authority the Falmouth, Bristol, Portsmouth and Plymouth mail-coaches, which were all being paid for at a higher rate than his superiors thought necessary, but which they had not agreed to discontinue. Questioned about this action, that had thrown the mails in the south-west of England into utter confusion, he insolently declared that what their lordships objected to on one road was surely objectionable on another; if they preferred mail-carts to mail-coaches they could have them. A violent quarrel then blazed up. Palmer charged the Postmasters-General with deliberately and