day, contrived to identify himself in the public view with the Crown itself.  There is nothing invidious in this use of a racial term.  It was one of Lord Beaconsfield’s finest qualities that he laboured all through his life to make his race glorious and admired.  To a Jewish boy—­a friend of my own—­who was presented to him in his old age he said:  “You and I belong to a race which knows how to do everything but fail.”

Is Lord Beaconsfield’s biography ever to be given to the world?  Not in our time, at any rate, if we may judge by the signs.  Perhaps Lord Rowton finds it more convenient to live on the vague but splendid anticipations of future success than on the admitted and definite failure of a too cautious book.  Perhaps he finds his personal dignity enhanced by those mysterious flittings to Windsor and Osborne, where he is understood to be comparing manuscripts and revising proofs with an Illustrious Personage.  But there is the less occasion to lament Lord Rowton’s tardiness, because we already possess Mr. Froude’s admirable monograph on Lord Beaconsfield in the series of The Queen’s Prime Ministers, and an extremely clear-sighted account of his relations with the Crown in Mr. Reginald Brett’s Yoke of Empire.

My present purpose is not controversial.  I do not intend to estimate the soundness of Lord Beaconsfield’s opinions or the permanent value of his political work.  It is enough to recall what the last German Ambassador—­Count Muenster—­told me, and what, in a curtailed form, has been so often quoted.  Prince Bismarck said, “I think nothing of their Lord Salisbury.  He is only a lath painted to look like iron.  But that old Jew means business.”  This is merely a parenthesis.  I am at present concerned only with Lord Beaconsfield’s personal traits.  When I first encountered him he was already an old man.  He had left far behind those wonderful days of the black velvet dress-coat lined with white satin, the “gorgeous gold flowers on a splendidly embroidered waistcoat,” the jewelled rings worn outside the white gloves, the evening cane of ivory inlaid with gold and adorned with a tassel of black silk.  “We were none of us fools,” said one of his most brilliant contemporaries, “and each man talked his best; but we all agreed that the cleverest fellow in the party was the young Jew in the green velvet trousers.”  Considerably in the background, too, were the grotesque performances of his rural life, when, making up for the character of a country gentleman, he “rode an Arabian mare for thirty miles across country without stopping,” attended Quarter Sessions in drab breeches and gaiters, and wandered about the lanes round Hughenden pecking up primroses with a spud.