1“... These are concessionary, not Conservative principles. This party treats institutions as we do our pheasants, they preserve only to destroy them.”

2Swift, adverting to National Debt.

3Cardinal Newman afterwards inveighed against the same union of faithlessness and Mammon in one of his finest sermons. Disraeli constantly dwelt on the dangers that liberty might suffer, if a democracy unreconciled to monarchy and its institutions became a class instead of an element, and was brought into collision with the “three per cents.” The despotisms of bare democracy and of aggravated plutocracy were equally distasteful to him, and he feared their union. Cf. many striking passages in The Press, 1853–59.

4With this passage should be compared the striking remarks on p. 222 of The Political Biography of Lord George Bentinck.

5“It was that noble ambition, the highest and the best, that must be born in the heart and organised in the brain, which will not let a man be content unless his intellectual power is recognised by his race, and desires that it should contribute to their welfare.” Thus he speaks of Coningsby, the castle of whose fathers is not to be one “of Indolence.”

6Through Lord Durham, Lord J. Russell, and Lord Melbourne, whom he met early at Mrs. Norton’s.

7I may mention that when he wrote Alarcos in six weeks, an intimate (I think Lord Strangford) asked him why he had turned his energies to tragedy. “The idea haunted me,” was the reply, “and I could not rest until I had given it expression.”

8There is a touch also of his grandfather in the “Mr. Putney Giles” of Lothair, who: “never made difficulties, but always overcame them.” In both “Miriam” (Alroy) “Venetia” and “Myra” (Endymion) there are direct transferences from his sister’s temperament; and “St. Barbe” is far more Hayward than Thackeray.

9Cf. the moralisations in its strange account of the hero’s malady.

10The Infernal Marriage.

11So called owing to Lord Grey’s query in a letter. His brother had just opposed the young Disraeli, standing as an “independent” and a “reformer” at High (or “Chepping”) Wycombe; and his brilliant speeches on the hustings had been republished as The Crisis Examined.

12After he had been articled to a firm of solicitors at seventeen, and eventually called to the bar, his father had wished him to enter a government office. Cf. Mr. Lake’s “Reminiscences.”

13Cf. p. 254.

14It treated of a hero outlawed under the Alien Act by a Ministry resenting a poem (cf. Smiles’ “Memoirs of John Murray”). Disraeli had also edited a “history” of Paul Jones. Of his early American pamphlet, I speak later on. A Mr. Powles—“something in the city”—was concerned in assisting both this and the Representative.

15Of Keats it sings—

16It succeeded a respectable pro-Canning and pro-Queen-Caroline weekly, to which Disraeli seems to have contributed as a lad also. Its foundation brought him to Sir Walter Scott, and to Lockhart, who at first disdained to be “editor,” but melted when Disraeli assured him that he would be “Director-general” of a controlling organ. Only a temporary breach with Murray was caused by Disraeli’s speedy withdrawal from the concern. But for Lockhart, as a “tenth-rate novelist,” Disraeli expressed contempt in 1833, when he proposed to write for the Edinburgh, presided over by Napier. Cf. British Museum, Add. MS. 34,616, f. 45.

17This is no imaginary picture. Cf. Isaac Disraeli’s letters in the British Museum, Add. MS. 34,571, ff. 94, 96. Bradenham Manor, now the residence of my friend, Mr. Graves, had been under Queen Anne the seat of the Earl of Strafford through his marriage with a City heiress.

18In a future chapter I shall revert to this episode, which Disraeli ever deplored. His valet, in bachelor days, at 35, Duke Street, St. James—one Whittlestone, like Disraeli’s servant in the East, Byron’s Tita, provided for as attendant in a government office by his master—used to retail many scraps of such gossip. The young Disraeli’s novels, he averred, were written in bed. Heroes truly should dispense with valets.

19In The Press (1853–59)—which vies with Swift in the Examiner and Bolingbroke in the Craftsman, and to which Lord Derby and Shirley Brooks also contributed—Disraeli finely characterises Chatham as “a forest oak in a suburban garden.”

20Of this virtue, singled out with domestic purity by Gladstone for praise in Disraeli, the late Lady J. Manners wrote, “He feared nobody but God.” In my eighth chapter I shall quote Jowett’s verdict.

21“The Later Years of Lord Beaconsfield,” by Janetta, Lady J. Manners, Blackwood, 1881.

22In 1852 he sought and obtained a long interview with Feargus O’Connor, whose correspondence in the Star he had utilised seven years before in Sybil.

23“Thus, amid all the strange vicissitudes of life, we are ever, as it were, moving in a circle.”

24In 1832.

25His Edinburgh speech of 1867 and his Glasgow address of 1873—on “Representation” and “Equality” respectively rank among his best.

26So also does another. Lady Beaconsfield, waiting up, as was her wont even in extreme age, for her husband’s return after a critical effort, entered the library in the small hours of the morning (and in nÉgligÉe), and impetuously embraced what turned out to be Lord Cairns writing an important minute before Disraeli’s arrival.

27When Lord Derby came in in 1852, “At last we have got a status,” he said; “I feel like a young girl going to her first ball.”

28British Museum Add. MS. 34,645, f. 19.

29In The Press Disraeli illustrates this historical fact with infinite knowledge in a remarkable passage.

30In 1850, 1852, 1855, and 1859.

31Like most of the Peelites, Mr. Gladstone was not proof against a certain air of over-righteous condescension and patronage. Even in the ’sixties he notes in his diary that, meeting Disraeli at a time of trial, he extended his hand, which was “kindly accepted.” But he honestly admired his gifts, and in 1859 generously disdained to “bargain” him “out of the saddle.”

32Not only convictions, but tactics also. Mr. Gladstone often blamed actions in others which he afterwards adopted; Disraeli never did. I subjoin a few instances. In 1852 he blamed Disraeli’s budget-proposal for repealing half the malt tax; he himself afterwards repealed the whole. In 1867 he blamed Disraeli’s first introduction of the Reform Act by resolutions; next year he did the same with his Irish Church Bill. In 1869 he severely blamed Disraeli for resigning without meeting Parliament; in 1874 he himself followed suit.

33Some of the best in his earliest speeches are derived from “Don Quixote.”

34Letters to the Whigs, The Press, May 7, 1853.

35Letters to the Whigs, The Press, May 14, 1853.

36Disraeli always insisted on the indispensability of the party system. As he pointed out of Bolingbroke, so in his own case, the idea of a “national” party had to be accommodated to conservatism. Gladstone, too, said of Peel, in 1846, that “to abjure party was impossible” (Morley, i. 295; cf. Disraeli’s Life of Lord George Bentinck, p. 224). After repeal was carried, Peel gave great offence to his followers—and especially to Mr. Gladstone—by singling out its illustrious and original champion for praise.

37“As for the Irish bill on which he had turned Peel out, it was one of the worst of all coercion bills; Peel, with 117 followers, evidently could not have carried on the Government, and what sense could there have been in voting for a bad bill in order to retain in office an impossible Ministry?”—He might have added that the bill—supported some months earlier by Lord John and Lord G. Bentinck—under protest as only excusable through urgency, was delayed by Peel to carry the repeal, until its necessity had vanished.

38He said (1846): “... It was no wonder they (the Protectionists) regarded themselves as betrayed, and unfortunately it had been the fate of Sir R. Peel to perform the same operation twice.” From the party standpoint there was abundant justification. Gladstone in old age declared that “Disraeli’s brilliant philippics surpassed even their reputation, and that, under their lash, Peel sat powerless.” Cf. Morley’s “Gladstone,” i. 296, iii. 465. “Dealt with them with a kind of righteous dulness”—“The Protectionist secession due to three men. Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.” The real fault found with Disraeli by his enemies (but afterwards) was that he “did not care a straw” for Protection. The reader must judge after my two next chapters.

39It was a sail, however, that could not bear being crossed by contrary winds. From youth upwards Gladstone could never brook opposition.

40In 1831 Sir Henry Bulwer—teste Mr. Frederick Greenwood—was asked by his famous brother to meet his marvellous new friend at dinner. The company was all young, ambitious, and able; yet all agreed that their master was “the man in the green trousers.” Perhaps they were not quite so green as Sir Henry’s recollection painted them.

41The title of “Beaconsfield,” long before foreshadowed in Vivian Grey, was adopted in homage to the abode of Burke.

42This phrase was used by Disraeli in a speech of the ’fifties. Its origin, though not its phrasing, is to be found in Bolingbroke.

43His conviction, however, that our Lord came to fulfil, not to abolish, was directly derived from his father’s “Genius of Judaism.”

44I am informed, through the kindness of my friend Mr. George Russell, that the original of “Theodora” was one Madame Mario, nÉe Jessie White.

45“Shelley and Lord Beaconsfield.” Blackwood, 1881. For private circulation. Only twenty-five copies printed.

46Canning’s ideas on variety of representation influenced Disraeli.

47It must be remembered that in 1833 the Radicals were a very small band, and differed vastly from their successors of the Manchester School. They were thoroughly discontented with the middle-class legislation of the Reform Bill, and they were violently opposed to the Whig pretensions to popular emancipation. Disraeli shared these feelings.

48It should be remembered that in the brilliant characterisation of Bolingbroke in Disraeli’s Letter to Lord Lyndhurst, he says, “that despite the Whig affectation of popular sympathies, and the Tory admiration of arbitrary power, Bolingbroke penetrated appearances, and perceived that the choice really lay ‘between oligarchy and democracy.’”

49A sentence from his appeal to Mr. Gladstone in 1859.

50The Press, June 11, 1853. The whole series is full of great strokes; and there is also a critique on the dividing periods of English history, which is most bold and original.

51Vide “Chartism,” p. 35.

52Contarini Fleming. For a like passage of about the same date, cf. ante, p. 48.

53And cf. post at the opening of Chapter VI.

54The Spirit of Whiggism.

55Cf. his fine speech on “Agricultural Distress,” April 29, 1879. He urged the same, almost in the same words, on February 17, 1863.

56Letter to Lord Lyndhurst. So, too, in his early Spirit of Whiggism. In a speech of 1865 he defines an Estate as “a political body invested with political power for the government of the country and for the public good,” and “therefore a body founded upon privilege and not upon right,” and “in the noblest and properest sense of the term an aristocratic body.” Under the Plantagenets it was at one time mooted whether the Law should not be raised into such an “Estate.” He says the same in a letter of explanation to Lord Malmesbury.

57“Our constituent body should be numerous enough to be independent, and select enough to be responsible.” In 1865 he distinguished between the constitution, absorbing the best from each class, and a “democracy”—“the tyranny of one class.”

58Runnymede Letters.

59In 1733 Walpole objected to the repeal of the Septennial Act precisely on the grounds that it would involve over-confidence in the people, and democratise England.

60“... He (Pitt) created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill....”—Sybil.

61The motion was designed to throw the burden of taxation on land. Disraeli showed that land was no monopoly, while it remained a security for good government; and that the rental of property in Great Britain, if equally divided among its proprietors, would only amount to £170 as an average annual income per head.

62“... But thanks to parliamentary patriotism, the people of England were saved from Ship-money, which money the wealthy paid, and only got in its stead the customs and the excise, which the poor mainly supply....”—Sybil.

63“... Burke effected for the Whigs what Bolingbroke in a preceding age had done for the Tories: he restored the moral existence of the party. He taught them to recur to the ancient principles of their connection.... He raised the tone of their public discourse; he breathed a high spirit into their public acts....”—Ibid.

64“... In my time” (said Mr. Ormsby) “... a proper majority was a third of the House. That was Lord Liverpool’s majority. Lord Monmouth used to say that there were ten families in this country who, if they could only agree, could always share the government. Ah! those were the good old times!...”

65That this object was of direct design is proved by a correspondence of Cobden with Sir Robert Peel.

66In a speech of 1864, Disraeli said: “... For my own part, believing that parliamentary government is practically impossible without two organised parties, that without them it would be the most contemptible and corrupt system which could be devised, I always regret anything that may damage the just influence of either of the great parties in the State.”

67The great depression of 1847–51 was not wholly caused by the fiscal change. It was largely due to reaction after the railway mania, as Disraeli pointed out in a speech of 1879. It was followed by a rise in wages, due, not to Free Trade, but to the large imports of newly discovered gold; and by an increased purchasing power which was due to Peel’s large abatements of the tariff.

68It should be borne in mind that Disraeli sometimes employs the words “aristocracy” and “democracy” to mean the order of aristocrats and democrats, sometimes to mean the systems of exclusion and inclusion, sometimes to mean the government by the best and by the miscellaneous, and oftener as indicating elements in our Constitution.

69This phrase is American, and refers to the democrat extremists, conduct in Tammany Hall in 1834. The same year had seen the invention of the “self-lighting” cigar.

70At that time, under the full spell of the analogy which the age of Walpole presented, he believed that triennial parliaments and the ballot might redress the balance of constitutional power and foil the oligarchs who had baffled the people by espousing a popular cry. In 1852, however, he said, with regard to those proposals brought forward by Mr. Hume: “... He did not object to them, but he saw no necessity to adopt them. His objections to the latter were distinctly founded on the limits of the franchise which the settlement of 1832 had not sufficiently extended, but ... if they had universal suffrage they came to a new constitution—a constitution commonly called the ‘Sovereignty of the People,’ but that is not the Constitution of England; for, wisely modified as that monarchy may be, the Constitution of England is the sovereignty of Queen Victoria.”

71Cf. speech, May 18, 1871. The Whigs, who in 1843 called it “a fungus of monopoly,” worked and upheld it afterwards as “Liberals.” Now that a democracy and an Empire are being “run” at the same time, its permanence, for many years questioned, seems assured.

72This preluded the “Lodger franchise,” of which, in 1867, Disraeli said he had been “the father” (cf. p. 108).

73Cf. p. 109.

74This once more is emphasised by De Tocqueville as the essence of centralisation.

75Cf. Morley’s “Gladstone,” vol. i. p. 262.

76Cf. the passage from The Press, cited ante, p. 7 note, and post at opening of Chapter VI.

77Bishop Latimer—quoted as motto to Sybil.

78Book iv. ch. iv.: “... To be a noble Master among noble Workers will again be the first ambition with some few; to be a rich Master only the second.”

79“Sidonia” stands for several types in addition to Disraeli’s own. “Oswald Millbank” is in part painted from the young Gladstone. Most of the other characters in Coningsby are familiarly ascribed to their originals.

80This phrase he twice repeats; the first time in that fine speech at the Manchester AthenÆum (1844), on the “Acquirement of Knowledge,” which expressed his undying sympathy with the ideals, perplexities, and possibilities of youth.

81This was the speech in which he said that Gladstone founded “a great measure on a small precedent. He traces the steam-engine always back to the tea-kettle.”

82The rise in wages and prices about 1851 was mainly due not to “Free Trade,” but to the influx of newly discovered gold. In 1842, when Peel was revising the tariff, bread was actually cheaper than it had been for many years previously, or till 1849 afterwards. In 1851 corn had sunk to about 40s., nearly 8s. lower than Peel had contemplated as possible. The immediate results of repeal were not the cheapening of bread; but the sudden cheapening of commodities was effected by Peel’s revision of the tariff. In 1851, however, all other agricultural produce but wheat was at fair prices, and Disraeli then wrote, “It is possible that agriculture may flourish without a high price of wheat or without producing any” (Correspondence, p. 262).

83“... A large system of commercial intercourse on the principle of reciprocal advantage.”

84The land was promised compensation, but received none worth the name. It was deluded by vague promises of actual benefit under the new system. Peel even asserted that corn would never fall under forty-eight shillings per quarter.

It is often forgotten that in 1843 Peel favoured a preferential tariff for Canada, and that both he and Gladstone were then for Canadian “retaliation” on America.

85It is only the old evil of over-production and “glut in the market.” While England was still the main manufacturer and exporter, she herself periodically “dumped,” and suffered from the process.

86A satirical passage in his very early Popanilla may be compared.

87These he had long before predicted, and his forecast that they would cause some of the prosperity of manufacture, apart from “Free Trade,” has come true.

88“History of Israel,” vol. iv. p. 286.

89That the Church was “a main obstacle to oligarchical power,” Disraeli pointed out as early as in his Runnymede Letters.

90Answer to “Eikon Basilike.”

91“The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Commonwealth.”

92Here we find an early beginning of “the Venetian oligarchy.”

93These paradoxes, like “Sidonia’s,” have been constantly proved true. I may mention a fantastic description of a sculptured Eastern cavern, which recent discovery has confirmed.

94Cf. Vivian Grey. This idea is derived from Bolingbroke’s philosophical works.

95A very favourite idea of Disraeli’s, and the source of his disbelief in any “equality of man.” Cf. “All is race” in Coningsby, and the passage already quoted in my second chapter from Contarini Fleming. So again in the Preface to Lothair, “One of the consequences of the Divine government of this world, which has ordained that the sacred purposes should be effected by the instrumentality of various human races, must be occasionally a jealous discontent with the revelation entrusted to a particular family.... The documents will yet bear a greater amount both of erudition and examination than they have received; but the Word of God is eternal, and will survive the spheres.”

96“... What is styled Materialism is in the ascendant. To those who believe that an Atheistical society, though it may be polished and amiable, involves the seeds of anarchy, the prospect is full of gloom.”

97“... Let us at length discover that no society can long subsist that is based upon metaphysical absurdities.... Before me is a famous treatise on human nature by a Professor of KÖnigsberg. No one has more profoundly meditated on the attributes of his subject. It is evident that in the deep study of his own intelligence he has discovered a noble method of expounding that of others. Yet when I close his volumes, can I conceal from myself that all this time I have been studying a treatise upon the nature—not of man, but of a German?”—Contarini Fleming.

98The hackneyed mot of “Sensible men never tell” is derived from Voltaire.

99In the Preface to Lothair he says:—“The sceptical efforts of the discoveries of science, and the uneasy feeling that they cannot co-exist with our old religious convictions, have their origin in the conviction that the general body who have suddenly become conscious of these physical truths are not so well acquainted as is desirable with the past history of man. Astonished by their unprepared emergence from ignorance to a certain degree of information, their amazed intelligence takes refuge in the theory of what is conveniently called Progress, and every step in scientific discovery seems further to remove them from the path of primÆval inspiration. But there is no fallacy so flagrant as to suppose that the modern ages have the peculiar privilege of scientific discovery, or that they are distinguished as the epochs of the most illustrious inventions. No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as language. What are the most brilliant of our chemical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals? It is a vulgar belief that our astronomical knowledge dates only from the recent century, when it was rescued from the monks who imprisoned Galileo. But Hipparchus, who lived before our Divine Master ... discovered the precession of the equinoxes; and Copernicus ... avows himself as only the champion of Pythagoras.... Even the most modish schemes of the day on the origin of things ... will be found mainly to rest on the atom of Epicurus and the monad of Thales. Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from heaven to man....” So, too, in a speech of 1861, dealing both with science and the higher criticism, “Epicurus was, I apprehend, as great a man as Hegel; but it was not Epicurus who subverted the religion of Olympus.”

100Probably always in England. In France the reverse is happening.

101This idea is, among other speeches, worked out in that delivered at Amersham, December 4, 1860, where he says: “The parish is one of the strongest securities for local government, and on local government mainly depends our political liberty.” He points out that the Church is not oligarchical, and does not claim those exclusive privileges which the Nonconformists often do. It is national in its comprehensive ties with the country and its inclusiveness. The abolition of the parish system would alone prove a national and social upheaval.

102This policy was pressed by Peel in the early ’forties, and led to the fine work of the National Schools.

103That of Strauss.

104In the Croker Papers will be found a masterly letter from Sir Robert Peel on the importance of the Church rising to her educational opportunities. It was Peel’s foresight that produced the National Schools. Peel, though latitudinarian, was a Church statesman.

105I may add that what Disraeli resented in Gladstone’s thwarted proposals for his Catholic University scheme was that it sought to exclude theology and philosophy—an exception unworthy of any “Universitas rerum,” and deeply repugnant to the Catholics.

106Letter to D. O’Connell, 1835.

107This has been elaborately developed by Bolingbroke in his “Philosophical Works.”

108How true this has now proved itself in France!

109Elsewhere Disraeli said that Paris always remains a republic.

110It will be noticed that Sir Robert goes beyond Disraeli’s ideas of direct kingship.

111In 1872, Disraeli said, after stating that Lord Derby’s successor was no enemy to Russian aggression, “... I speak of what I know, not of what I believe, but of what I have evidence in my possession to prove, that the Crimean War would never have happened if Lord Derby had remained in office....” Lord Derby’s error in resigning in 1853 he always deplored; just as he regretted equally his rash acceptance of office during the previous year, and his more fatal timidity in shrinking from assuming it in 1855.

112This passage was written before the events of 1903.

113This was realised some ten years later by the repeal of the Sugar Duties.

114The speech about Income Tax, which contains another masterly analysis of the displacement of labour. Previously, in 1845, he had said of Canada, “... I am not one of those who think that its inevitable lot is to become annexed to the United States. Canada has all the elements of a great and independent country, and is destined, I sometimes believe, to be the Russia of the New World.”

115“???’ ??? ?p????e?’ ???? ?atapef???t??a.”

116It will be remembered that in Coningsby “Rigby’s” election speech called everything with which he disagreed “un-English.” Dickens’s satire of the misuse of “un-English” in the person of “Podsnap” may be compared.

117“Light and leading,” which Disraeli employed long before the famous letter to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, in a speech of 1858, comes of course from Burke. His theory of the House of Lords in 1861 as “an intermediate body” is derived from Bolingbroke and Burke. “Peace with honour” he employed in one of his Crimean speeches. Many of his phrases were derived from the works of his father.

118He had in an earlier speech considered this question with regard to Canada.

119This very phrase was repeated by Lord Beaconsfield in 1876.

120This point is admirably elucidated by Mr. Ewald in his “Life and Times of Lord Beaconsfield.”

121Chiefly that of the Turkish frontier in Europe, and of the Russian in Asia.

122A most interesting collection might be made of Disraeli’s ready and fluent illustration by precedents. For of precedent his memory was quite as retentive as Gladstone’s. In his famous Address to the Crown of 1864, he was sharply blamed for referring to “the just influence of England being lowered” in the extraordinary tangle of alternate brag and whimper that attended the Government’s action in the Danish embroilment. This language was solemnly declared “unprecedented since the great days of the Norths and the Foxes.” But Disraeli instantly proved that Fox himself had used language in his own Address far more violent and censorious of the Ministry in 1846. So, again, on at least two occasions when the phrases “political morality” and “political infamy” were bandied for partisan purposes, he effectively hurled back the taunts in the teeth of their inventors, and refuted present profession by past conduct. When Palmerston again twitted him, in 1846, he received a reminder which brought home the jaunty service of seven successive Administrations, and all this, though he never attacked small game, and never any “unless he had been first assailed.” In the earlier numbers of The Press are many most interesting historical instances of how “principles” may be confused with “measures,” when the latter have to be relinquished in office from the practical duty of carrying on the Government, while at the same time the former can be developed in other directions when the national condemnation of the particular measure is deliberate. So Fox had acted towards Catholic emancipation, Russell towards the Appropriation Bill, the Whigs in the ’forties towards the Income Tax, and Disraeli in 1852 towards “Protection.” So, he argued in many previous utterances, the principle must now be followed by relieving the land, now placed under unfair conditions of competition, of its burdens.

123Of Disraeli’s Indian policy this much may here be noted. While allowing Russia to expand where she was entitled or compelled by war, or allowed by opening intrigues, he wished to baffle her as against Great Britain.

(1) By an independent Afghanistan, with a proper frontier and its Indian “gates” barred.

(2) By preventing Russia through Turkestan’s approaches to Afghan and Persia’s eastern border.

(3) By precluding her from Persia’s western border through the regions of the Euphrates Valley, (a) through making Turkey compact in Asia (Erzeroum and Bayazid); (b) through Cyprus guarding the Mediterranean approaches.

124“... Do you think a man like that, called upon to deal with a Metternich or a Pozzo, has no advantage over an individual who never leaves his chair in Downing Street except to kill grouse? Pah! Metternich and Pozzo know very well that Lord Roehampton knows them....” “Roehampton” is Palmerston. The prophecy of the Congress repeats one in Contarini.

125Of the many passages that may be read in this connection, including that fine ironical one of the Feast of Tabernacles in Tancred, paralleled by that about “Moses Lump” in Heine, and the telling chapter in the Life of Lord George Bentinck, I will only cite one less familiar from Alroy: “... All was silent: alone the Hebrew prince stood, amid the regal creation of the Macedonian captains. Empires and dynasties flourish and pass away; the proud metropolis becomes a solitude, the conquering kingdom even a desert; but Israel still remains, still a descendant of the most ancient kings breathed amid these royal ruins, and still the eternal sun could never arise without gilding the towers of living Jerusalem.” This (with its after-irony of “Alroy’s” seizure by the Kourdish bandits) may be compared with the satire in which Disraeli encountered Mr. Newdegate’s appeals to “prophecy:” “... They have survived the Pharaohs, they have survived the CÆsars, they have survived the Antonines and the SeleucidÆ, and I think they will survive the arguments of the right honourable member....” Mr. Morley tells that Mr. Gladstone said that Disraeli asserted that only those nations that behaved well to the Jews prospered. Disraeli, in saying so, however, only repeated a dictum of Frederick the Great.

126“Say what they like,” so “Herbert” in Venetia, “there is a spell in the shores of the Mediterranean Sea which no others can rival. Never was such a union of natural loveliness and magical associations! On these shores have risen all that interests us in the past—Egypt and Palestine, Greece, Rome, and Carthage, Moorish Spain and feudal Italy. These shores have yielded us our religion, our arts, our literature, and our laws. If all that we have gained from the shores of the Mediterranean was erased from the memory of man, we should be savages.”

127It was translated into Greek, as Alroy was into Hebrew.

128He mentions it both in his Home Letters and in Tancred as to be acquired by England.

129In 1878, Disraeli, after emphasising the Sultan’s friendliness to Greece and the value of a GrÆco-Turk entente as a bar to “Pan-Slavic monopoly,” said: “... No prince, probably, that has ever lived has gone through such a series of catastrophes. One of his predecessors commits suicide; his immediate predecessor is subject to a visitation even more awful. The moment he ascends the throne, his ministers are assassinated. A conspiracy breaks out in his own palace, and then he learns that his kingdom is invaded, ... and that his enemy is at his gates; yet with all these trials, ... he has never swerved in ... the feeling of a desire to deal with Greece in a spirit of friendship.... He is apparently a man whose ... impulses are good, ... and where impulses are good, there is always hope.”

130Cf. his Life of Lord George Bentinck, p. 170.

131This was the speech in which Disraeli styled himself as not only a devoted parliamentarian, but “a gentleman of the Press.”

132Disraeli always maintained that the expulsion of Louis Philippe was the act of the secret societies, and not that of the French nation. He had reason to know. His letters in 1848 are full of gloom regarding the outlook in Europe. So were Carlyle’s.

133Life of Lord George Bentinck (1852).

134“... The end of their system ... is the glory of the empire and the prosperity of the people.”

135Disraeli was always careful to distinguish between “revolution”—a permanent upheaval, and “insurrection”—a transitory outburst. Thus he expressly terms the continental movements of 1848, “insurrections.”

136Though published in 1836, it was written considerably earlier.

137Explaining, in 1835, his phrase that “the Whigs had grasped the bloody hand of O’Connell,” Disraeli said: “I mean that they had formed an alliance with one whose policy was hostile to the preservation of the country, who threatens us with a dismemberment of the empire, which cannot take place without a civil war.”

138Cf. the “passionate carelessness” in “the old state of affairs” of “this experimental chapter in our history” in the speech of March, 1869. On the “Maynooth Grant” question, also, he observed, in 1846, that the boons offered to the Roman Catholics were, that “two should sleep in a bed instead of three.”

139Eight years before, Disraeli had written in the trenchant slap-dash of his Runnymede Letters: “... Then, Ireland must be tranquillised. So I think. Feed the poor and hang the agitators. That will do it. But that’s not your way. It is the destruction of the English and Protestant interest that is the Whig specific for Irish tranquillity.”

140He was alluding to Lord Derby’s earlier efforts. And again, in another speech: “... The principles of our policy were, first, to create and not destroy; and, secondly, to acknowledge that you could not in any more effectual way strengthen the Protestant interest than by doing justice to the Roman Catholics.”

141He pointed out that England experienced both Norman and Dutch conquests; and that if Cromwell conquered Ireland, he conquered England too.

142“... Fenianism now is not rampant; we think we have gauged its lowest depths, and we are not afraid of it” (Speech, April 3, 1868). As regards coercion, he always maintained that proved sedition alone justified it.

143He wrote that the question of the Church in Ireland was one totally without the pale of modern politics. His programme also at the dissolution breathed not a word on the subject.

144Rogers is mentioned in the very young Disraeli’s Infernal Marriage—“The Pleasures of Oblivion. The poet, apparently, is fond of his subject.”

145He lost his life in restoring Ely Cathedral. He designed a portion of Belgrave Square. When Disraeli was at last returned to Parliament, he wrote to his sister, “So much for Uncle G. and his ‘maddest of mad acts.’”

146He mentions several less familiar among the ancients. For instance, John of Padua in Endymion.

147In a letter of the late ’forties to his sister, he says with surprise that Croker (who disclaimed having read it) should have greeted him with effusion. In the same correspondence he repeats a mot that the two most disgusting things in life—because you cannot deny them—are Warrender’s wealth, and Croker’s talents.

148When they met, Sir Walter treated him with cordiality; nevertheless, in one of his late letters he styles him “un vieux crapaud.”

149In 1761 he was even bankrupt. Cf. British Museum. Add. MS. 36,191, f. 8.

150Theodore Hook is the original of “Lucian Gay” in Coningsby.

151His acquaintance seems to have been made through “Platonist Taylor,” who gave literary symposia.

152In Spain he rescued a lady from robbers. On the Ægean he armed and drilled the crew against pirates. In Palestine, with difficulty and courage, he forced his way into the Mosque of Omar. In Egypt a pacha asked him to draft a constitution.

153Cf. British Museum Add. MS. 34,616, f. 45. I have referred to this in Chapter I.

154“Sure you were to find yourself surrounded by celebrities, and men were welcomed there if they were clever, before they were famous, which showed it was a house that regarded intellect, and did not seek merely to gratify its vanity by being surrounded by the distinguished.”—Coningsby.

155Vivian Grey.

156He liked to descant on the fast-fading and now vanished political Salon. That of “Lady St. Julians,” who “was not likely to forget her friends,” will be recalled by perusers of Sybil. In a Glasgow speech—recently revived by an evening journal—he praised, with admiration, Lady Palmerston’s, where diplomatists, at loggerheads with the minister, could meet him in the neutral zone of his gifted wife’s catholic hospitality.

157“Great as might have been the original errors of Herbert ... they might, in the first instance, be traced rather to a perverted view of society than of himself.”

158Byron also figures in Ixion. “All is mystery, and all is gloom, and ever and anon, from out the clouds a star breaks forth and glitters, and that star is Poetry.”

159This recalls us to the ’thirties. In a letter to his sister he mentions the wineglass shape as a new receptacle for champagne.

160It may, however, refer to a certain Lady Sykes.

161There is another similar passage so early as in Popanilla, which says that “... there were those who paradoxically held all this Elysian morality was one of great delusion, and that this scrupulous anxiety about the conduct of others arose from a principle, not of Purity, but Corruption. The woman who is “talked about,” these sages would affirm, is generally virtuous....” But the allusion may here be to Queen Caroline.

162Coningsby.

163Venetia; The Young Duke.

164Ibid.

165Ibid.

166The brilliant Mr. T.P. O’Connor, in the first edition of a “Biography” (which, perhaps, now he regrets), troubled himself to search out and enumerate the writs out against Disraeli in the early ’thirties. Most of his debts were for elections and “backing” his friends’ bills. From friends he never borrowed; always from “Levison’s.” Vivian Grey was originally written to defray a debt.

167Levison offers the required advance, £700 in cash, £800 in coals. The captain expostulates, and is answered: “Lord! my dear Captin, £800 worth of coals is a mere nothink. With your connection you will get rid of them in a morning. All you have got to do ... is to give your friends an order on us, and we will let you have cash at a little discount.... Three or four friends would do the thing.... Why, ’tayn’t four hundred chaldron, Captin.... Baron Squash takes ten thousand of us every year; but he has such a knack; he gits the clubs to take them.”

168It was written 1830–31.

169This quality is noticeable in his descriptions: Jerusalem at noon—“A city of stone in a land of iron with a sky of brass.” Seville—“Figaro in every street, Rosina on every balcony.” Cf. p. 304.

170It will be recalled that in opposing the Burials Bill, which he treated with respect, Disraeli, after expounding the parish rights in the churchyard, said, “I must confess that, were I a Dissenter contemplating burial, I should do so with feelings of the utmost satisfaction.”

171Cf. The Infernal Marriage—“Are there any critics in Hell?” “Myriads,” rejoined the ex-King of Lydia. There is a kindred remark in one of Landor’s Dialogues.

172From Swift, however.

173See his “Literary Character; or, The History of Men of Genius.”

174One of the best is the invective against the collapse of Peel’s “sliding scale:”—“... Of course the Whigs will be the chief mourners; they cannot but weep for their innocent, though it was an abortion. But ours was a fine child. Who can forget how its nurse dandled and fondled it? ‘What a charming babe! Delicious little thing! So thriving! Did you ever see such a beauty for its years?’ And then the nurse, in a fit of patriotic frenzy, dashes its brains out, and comes down to give master and mistress an account of this terrible murder. The nurse too, a person of a very orderly demeanour, not given to drink, and never showing any emotion, except of late when kicking against protection.”

175The late Duke of Abercorn.

176Of his verse I have not treated. No reader, however, of his fine sonnet on the Duke of Wellington, inscribed in the Stowe album, or of the wistful lyric addressed from the Ægean to his family in the Home Letters, or of the “Bignetta” rondel in the Young Duke, with its Heinesque close, or even of “Spring in the Apennines” from Venetia, can doubt his genuine gift for poetry and metre.

177“The art of poetry was to express natural feelings in unnatural language.”—Contarini.

178In five volumes. Its original dedication ran:—

179Vivian Grey.

180Contarini Fleming.

181Venetia.

182Cf. Bolingbroke’s “Compare the situations without comparing the characters.”

183This idea was emphasised by Bolingbroke.

184Hume’s election support, the challenge of O’Connell, the cultivation of Chandos, the “Canning” episode, the surrender of “protection,” and the delay in producing the Indian despatches, respectively.

185Notably in 1855.

186This is told in one of Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff’s “Diaries.”

187It is noticeable, as regards the habitual recurrence of his phrases, that in his early letters he always nicknames this first illness “the enemy,” the same as he used to his physicians in his last. His early ill health quickened his continual sympathy with suffering. No better instance could be read than his speech at the opening of the Hospital for Consumption, with his beautiful references to Jenny Lind, as song ministering to sorrow.

188At Berlin Bismarck said of him, “Disraeli is England.” His translated works were, and I believe are, read widely abroad.