But drunk on what?  On wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose.  But get drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a moat, in the dull solitude of your chamber, you awake with your intoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, the wave, the star, the clock, of everything that flies, sobs, rolls, sings, talks, what is the hour? and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will answer, “It is the hour to get drunk!” Not to be the martyred slave of Time, get drunk; get drunk unceasingly.  Wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose.

FROM A JOURNAL

I swear to myself henceforth to adopt the following rules as the everlasting rules of my life....  To pray every morning to God, the Fountain of all strength and of all justice; to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe.  To pray to them to give me necessary strength to accomplish all my tasks, and to grant my mother a life long enough to enjoy my reformation.  To work all day, or at least as long as my strength lasts.  To trust to God—­that is to say, to Justice itself—­for the success of my projects.  To pray again every evening to God to ask Him for life and strength, for my mother and myself.  To divide all my earnings into four parts—­one for my daily expenses, one for my creditors, one for my friends, and one for my mother.  To keep to principles of strict sobriety, and to banish all and every stimulant.

LORD BEACONSFIELD

(1804-1881)

BY ISA CARRINGTON CABELL

Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, born in London, December, 1804; died there April 19th, 1881.  His paternal ancestors were of the house of Lara, and held high rank among Hebrew-Spanish nobles till the tribunal of Torquemada drove them from Spain to Venice.  There, proud of their race and origin, they styled themselves, “Sons of Israel,” and became merchant princes.  But the city’s commerce failing, the grandfather of Benjamin Disraeli removed to London with a diminished but comfortable fortune.  His son, Isaac Disraeli, was a well-known literary man, and the author of ‘The Curiosities of Literature.’  On account of the political and social ostracism of the Jews in England, he had all his family baptized into the Church of England; but with Benjamin Disraeli especially, Christianity was never more than Judaism developed.  His belief and his affections were in his own race.

[Illustration:  Lord Beaconsfield]

Benjamin, like most Jewish youths, was educated in private schools, and at seventeen entered a solicitor’s office.  At twenty-two he published ‘Vivian Grey’ (London, 1826), which readable and amusing take-off of London society gave him great and instantaneous notoriety.  Its minute descriptions of the great world, its caricatures of well-known social and political personages, its magnificent diction,—­too magnificent to be taken quite seriously,—­excited inquiry; and the great world was amazed to discover that the impertinent observer was not one of themselves, but a boy in a lawyer’s office.  To add to the audacity, he had conceived himself the hero of these diverting situations, and by his cleverness had outwitted age, beauty, rank, diplomacy itself.