Disraeli’s peculiar humour just suited Froude’s taste.  Disraeli never laughed.  Even his smile was half inward.  The irony of life, and of his own position, was a subject of inexhaustible amusement to him.  There was nothing in his nature low, sordid, or petty.  It was not money, nor rank, but power which he coveted, and at which he aimed.  Irreproachable in domestic life, faithful in friendship, a placable enemy, undaunted by failure, accepting final defeat with philosophic calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and made use of prejudices which he did not feel.  Froude loved him, as he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything stuffy and commonplace.  From a constitutional history of English politics Disraeli might almost be omitted.  His Reform Act was not his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice.  In any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the principal figure.  In the Congress of Berlin, where he did nothing, or next to nothing, he attracted the gaze of every one, not for anything he said there, but because he was there at all.  If he had left an autobiography, it would be priceless, not for its facts, but for its opinions.  That Froude thoroughly understood him it would be rash to say.  But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that an ordinary writer would have missed altogether.  For instance, the full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one else exactly as Froude gave it.  Nothing like it had ever happened before.  It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever happen again.  Froude found the origin of the Established Church in the statutes of Henry viii.  Gladstone found it, or seemed to find it, in the poems of Homer.  In Disraeli’s eyes its pedigree was Semitic, and it ministered to the “craving credulity” of a sceptical age, undisturbed by the provincial arrogance that flashed or flared in an essay or review.

“In the year 1864,” says Froude, “Disraeli happened to be on a visit at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the chair.  The clerical mind had been doubly exercised, by the appearance of Colenso on the ‘Pentateuch’ and Darwin on the ’Origin of Species.’  Disraeli, to the surprise of every one, presented himself in the theatre.  He had long abandoned the satins and silks of his youth, but he was as careful of effect as he had ever been, and had prepared himself in a elaborately negligent.  He lounged into the assembly in a black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat, as if he had been accidentally passing through the town.  It was the fashion with University intellect to despise Disraeli as a man with neither sweetness nor light; but he was famous, or at least notorious, and when he rose to speak there was a general