He alternately affronts and cajoles his enemies; takes all that the world has to give; knows every pleasure; wins every prize; makes love to the daughters of men (without loving them); and winning the one he selects, secretly thanks Jehovah, God of his fathers, that he leaves no offspring—­because the woman fit for his mate and equal to mothering his children does not exist.

The sublimity of his egotism stands unrivaled.  It is so great that it is admirable.  We lift our hats to this man.  Napoleon gained the field without prejudice; but this man enters the list with hate and prejudice arrayed against him.  He plays the pawns of chance with literature, religion, politics, and moves the queen so as to checkmate all adversaries.  He flouts love, but to show the world that he yet knows the ideal, he occasionally pictures truth and trusting affection in his speeches and books.  This entire game of life is to him only a diversion.

They may jeer him down in the House of Commons, but his patience is unruffled.  He says, “Very well, I will wait.”  Now and again he smiles that wondrous, contagious smile, showing his white teeth and the depth of his dark, burning eyes.

He knows his power.  He revels in the wit he never expresses; he glories in this bright blade of the intellect that is never fully unsheathed.

They think he is interested in English politics—­pish!  Only world problems really interest him, and those that lie behind mean as much to him as those that are to come.  He is one with eternity, and the vanquished glory of Rome, the marble beauty of Athens, the Assyrian Sphinx, the flight from Egypt under the leadership of one who had killed his man—­yet had talked with God face to face—­these and the dim uncertainty of the unseen, are the things that interest him.  He is a dreamer of the Ghetto.

* * * * *

There was no taint of mixed blood in the veins of Benjamin Disraeli.  He traced his ancestry in a record that looks like a chapter from the Book of Numbers.  His forebears had known every persecution, every contumely, slight and disgrace.  Driven from Spain by the Inquisition, barely escaping with life, when Jewish blood actually fertilized the fields about Granada, his direct ancestor became one of the builders of Venice.  The Jews practically controlled the trade of the world in the sun-kissed days of prosperity, when Venice produced the books and the art of Christendom.

To trace an ancestry back to those who enthroned Venice on her hundred isles was surely something of which to be proud; and into the blood of Benjamin Disraeli went a dash of the gleam and glory and glamour of Venice—­the Venice of the Doges.