he takes that dignitary’s religious tenets seriously; that with Lady Constance, when she explains the “Mystery of Chaos” and shows how “the stars are formed out of the cream of the Milky Way, a sort of celestial cheese churned into light” the vision of the angels on Mt.  Sinai, and the celestial Sidonia who talks about the “Sublime and Solacing Doctrine of Theocratic Equality,”—­all these are passages where we wonder whether the author sneered or blushed when he wrote.  Certainly what has since been known as the Disraelian irony stings as we turn each page.

Meanwhile Disraeli had become a power in Parliament, and the bitter opponent of Peel, under whom Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, and the abrogation of the commercial system, had been carried without conditions and almost without mitigations.

Disraeli’s assaults on his leader delighted the Liberals; the country members felt indignant satisfaction at the deserved chastisement of their betrayer.  With malicious skill, Disraeli touched one after another the weak points in a character that was superficially vulnerable.  Finally the point before the House became Peel’s general conduct.  He was beaten by an overwhelming majority, and to the hand that dethroned him descended the task of building up the ruins of the Conservative party.  Disraeli’s best friends felt this a welcome necessity.  There is no example of a rise so sudden under such conditions.  His politics were as much distrusted as his serious literary passages.  But Disraeli was the single person equal to the task.  For the next twenty-five years he led the Conservative opposition in the House of Commons, varied by short intervals of power.  He was three times Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1853, 1858, and 1859; and on Lord Derby’s retirement in 1868 he became Prime Minister.

In 1870, having laid aside novel-writing for twenty years, he published ‘Lothair.’  It is a politico-religious romance aimed at the Jesuits, the Fenians, and the Communists.  It had an instantaneous success, for its author was the most conspicuous figure in Europe, but its popularity is also due to its own merits.  We are all of us snobs after a fashion and love high society.  The glory of entering the splendid portals of the real English dukes and duchesses seems to be ours when Disraeli throws open the magic door and ushers the reader in.  The decorations do not seem tawdry, nor the tinsel other than real.  We move with pleasurable excitement with Lothair from palace to castle, and thence to battle-field and scenes of dark intrigue.  The hint of the love affair with the Olympian Theodora appeals to our romance; the circumventing of the wily Cardinal and his accomplices is agreeable to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant mind; their discomfiture, and the crowning of virtue in the shape of a rescued Lothair married to the English Duke’s daughter with the fixed Church of England views, is what the reader expects and prays for, and is the last privilege of the real story-teller.  That the author has thrown aside his proclivities for Romanism as he showed them in ‘Sibyl,’ no more disturbs us than the eccentricities of his politics.  We do not quite give him our faith when he is most in earnest, talking Semitic Arianism on Mt.  Sinai.