all your life.  Never ask who wrote the Letters of Junius, or on which side of Whitehall Charles I. was beheaded; for if you do you will be considered a bore—­and that is something too dreadful for you at your tender age to understand.”  For these last two stories I by no means vouch.  They belong to the flotsam and jetsam of ephemeral gossip.  But the following, which I regard as eminently characteristic, I had from Lord Randolph Churchill.

Towards the end of Lord Beaconsfield’s second Premiership a younger politician asked the Premier to dinner.  It was a domestic event of the first importance, and no pains were spared to make the entertainment a success.  When the ladies retired, the host came and sat where the hostess had been, next to his distinguished guest.  “Will you have some more claret, Lord Beaconsfield?” “No, thank you, my dear fellow.  It is admirable wine—­true Falernian—­but I have already exceeded my prescribed quantity, and the gout holds me in its horrid clutch.”  When the party had broken up, the host and hostess were talking it over.  “I think the chief enjoyed himself,” said the host, “and I know he liked his claret.”  “Claret!” exclaimed the hostess; “why, he drank brandy-and-water all dinner-time.”

I said in an earlier paragraph that Lord Beaconsfield’s flattery was sometimes misplaced.  An instance recurs to my recollection.  He was staying in a country house where the whole party was Conservative with the exception of one rather plain, elderly lady, who belonged to a great Whig family.  The Tory leader was holding forth on politics to an admiring circle when the Whig lady came into the room.  Pausing in his conversation, Lord Beaconsfield exclaimed, in his most histrionic manner, “But hush!  We must not continue these Tory heresies until those pretty little ears have been covered up with those pretty little hands”—­a strange remark under any circumstances, and stranger still if, as his friends believed, it was honestly intended as an acceptable compliment.

Mr. Brett, who shows a curious sympathy with the personal character of Lord Beaconsfield, acquits him of the charge of flattery, and quotes his own description of his method:  “I never contradict; I never deny; but I sometimes forget.”  On the other hand, it has always been asserted by those who had the best opportunities of personal observation that Lord Beaconsfield succeeded in converting the dislike with which he had once been regarded in the highest quarters into admiration and even affection, by his elaborate and studied acquiescence in every claim, social or political, of Royalty, and by his unflagging perseverance in the art of flattery.  He was a courtier, not by descent or breeding, but by genius.  What could be more skilful than the inclusion of Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands with Coningsby and Sybil in the phrase “We authors"?—­than his grave declaration, “Your Majesty is the head of the literary profession"?—­than