Although the book was necessarily a short one, it is too characteristic to be lightly dismissed.  When Froude gave Mr. Reid the manuscript, he said, “It will please neither Disraeli’s friends nor his foes.  But it is at least an honest book.”  He heard, with more amusement than satisfaction, that it had pleased Gladstone.  For the political estimate of a modern and Parliamentary statesman Froude lacked some indispensable qualifications.  He knew little, and cared less, about the House of Commons, in which the best years of Disraeli’s life were passed.  He despised the party system, of which Disraeli was at once a product and a devotee.  He had no sympathy with Lord Beaconsfield’s foreign policy, and the colonial policy which he would have substituted for it was outside Lord Beaconsfield’s scope.  He had adopted from Carlyle the theory that Disraeli and Gladstone were both adventurers, the difference between them being that Disraeli only deceived others, whereas Gladstone deceived also himself.  But Gladstone had ignored whereas Disraeli, with singular magnanimity, had offered to the author of Shooting Niagara a pension and a Grand Cross of the Bath.

It was, however, as a man of letters rather than as a politician that Disraeli fascinated Froude, so much so that he is betrayed into the paradox of representing his hero as a lover of literature rather than politics.  Disraeli sometimes talked in that way himself, as when he was persuading Lightfoot to accept the Bishopric of Durham, and remarked, “I, too, have sacrificed inclination to duty.”  But he was hardly serious, and even in his novels it is the political parts that survive.  Although Froude had found it impossible to review Endymion, the book is very like the author, and can only be appreciated by those who have been behind the scenes in politics.  Froude’s idea of Disraeli as a man with a great opportunity who threw it away, who might have pacified Ireland and preferred to quarrel with Russia, was naturally not agreeable to Disraelites, and as a general rule it is desirable that a biographer should be able, to write from his victim’s point of view.  Yet, all said and done, Froude’s Beaconsfield is a work of genius, the gem of the series.  Professional politicians, with the curious exception of Gladstone, thought very little of it.  It was not written for them.  Disraeli was a many-sided man, so that there is room for various estimates of his character and career.  Of his early life Froude had no special knowledge.  He was not even aware that Disraeli had applied for office to Peel.  He shows sometimes an indifference to dry details, as when he makes Gladstone dissolve Parliament in 1873 immediately after his defeat on the Irish University Bill, and represents Russia as having by her own act repealed the Black Sea Clauses in the Treaty of Paris.  Startling too is his assertion that the Parliament of 1868 did nothing for England or Scotland, on account of its absorption in Irish affairs.  But he was not writing a formal history, and these points did not appeal to him at all.  He drew with inimitable skill a picture of the despised and fantastic Jew, vain as a peacock and absurdly dressed, alien in race and in his real creed, smiling sardonically at English ways, enthusiasms, and institutions, until he became, after years of struggle and obloquy, the idol of what was then the proudest aristocracy in the world.