wholly personal.  If ever there was a man to whom Milton’s well-known lines could fitly be applied it was Disraeli.  He scorned delights.  He lived laborious days.  In his youth he eschewed pleasures which generally attract others whose ambition only soars to a lower plane.  In the most intimate relations of life he subordinated all private inclinations to the main object he had in view.  He avowedly married, in the first instance, for money, although at a later stage his wife was able to afford herself the consolation, and to pay him the graceful compliment of obliterating the sordid reproach by declaring that “if he had the chance again he would marry her for love”—­a statement confirmed by his passionate, albeit somewhat histrionic love-letters.  The desire of fame, which may easily degenerate into a mere craving for notoriety, was unquestionably the spur which in his case raised his “clear spirit.”  So early as 1833, on being asked upon what principles he was going to stand at a forthcoming election, he replied, “On my head.”  He cared, in fact, little for principles of any kind, provided the goal of his ambition could be reached.  Throughout his career his main object was to rule his countrymen, and that object he attained by the adoption of methods which, whether they be regarded as tortuous or straightforward, morally justifiable or worthy of condemnation, were of a surety eminently successful.

The interest in Mr. Monypenny’s work is enormously enhanced by the personality of his hero.  In dealing with the careers of other English statesmen—­for instance, with Cromwell, Chatham, or Gladstone—­we do, indeed, glance—­and more than glance—­at the personality of the man, but our mature judgment is, or at all events should be, formed mainly on his measures.  We inquire what was their ultimate result, and what effect they produced?  We ask ourselves what degree of foresight the statesman displayed.  Did he rightly gauge the true nature of the political, economic, or social forces with which he had to deal, or did he mistake the signs of the times and allow himself to be lured away by some ephemeral will-o’-the-wisp in the pursuit of objects of secondary or even fallacious importance?  It is necessary to ask these questions in dealing with the career of Disraeli, but this mental process is, in his case, obscured to a very high degree by the absorbing personality of the man.  The individual fills the whole canvas almost to the extent of excluding all other objects from view.

No tale of fiction is, indeed, more strange than that which tells how this nimble-witted alien adventurer, with his poetic temperament, his weird Eastern imagination and excessive Western cynicism, his elastic mind which he himself described as “revolutionary,” and his apparently wayward but in reality carefully regulated unconventionality, succeeded, in spite of every initial disadvantage of race, birth, manners, and habits of thought, in dominating a proud aristocracy