So the important day came, and everybody took a holiday except the pickpockets and the police; and the King was crowned Emperor in the cathedral, with a grand choral service; and the Laureate wrote a fine poem calling upon the universe to admire the Idea, and describing the King as the greatest and most virtuous King ever invented. It was a very fine poem, beginning:-- Notion that roars and rolls, lapping the stars with its hem; Bursting the bands of Space, dwarfing eternal Aye. It became tacitly admitted that the King was the very greatest King in the world; and he was made an honorary fellow of the Society of Wiseacres and D.C.L. of the universities. But one day it leaked out that the Idea was _not_ the King's but the Prime Minister's. It would not have been known but for the Prime Minister having taken offence at the refusal of the King to appoint a Socialist agitator to the vacant post of Lord Chamberlain. You see, it was this way--the Prime Minister was very anxious to get in his right-hand man for the eastern division of Grumbury, N. Now, the Revolutionaries were very strong in the eastern division of Grumbury, and, by winning the favour of the agitator, the votes of the Revolutionaries would be secured. So, when the King refused to appoint the agitator, the Prime Minister, out of nastiness, let out that the Idea had really been his, and it had been he who had suggested it to the King. [Illustration] There were great difficulties now; for the honours which had been conferred on the King because of his Idea could not be cancelled; the title of Emperor could not be taken away again, nor the great poem unwritten. The latter step, especially, was not to be thought of; for a leading firm of publishers were just about to issue an _édition de luxe_ of the poem with sumptuous illustrations, engraved on diamond, from the pencil of an eminent R.A. who had become a classic and forgotten how to draw. (His name, however, could still draw: so he left the matter to that.) [Illustration]