and using its members as so many pawns on the chess-board which he had arranged to suit his own purposes.  Thrust into a society which was steeped in conventionality, he enforced attention to his will by a studied neglect of everything that was conventional.  Dealing with a class who honoured tradition, he startled the members of that class by shattering all the traditions which they had been taught to revere, and by endeavouring, with the help of specious arguments which many of them only half understood, to substitute others of an entirely novel character in their place.  Following much on the lines of those religious reformers who have at times sought to revive the early discipline and practices of the Church, he endeavoured to destroy the Toryism of his day by invoking the shade of a semi-mythical Toryism of the past.  Bolingbroke was the model to be followed, Shelburne was the tutelary genius of Pitt, and Charles I. was made to pose as “a virtuous and able monarch,” who was “the holocaust of direct taxation.”  Never, he declared, “did man lay down his heroic life for so great a cause, the cause of the Church and the cause of the Poor."[69] Aspiring to rise to power through the agency of Conservatives, whose narrow-minded conventional conservatism he despised, and to whose defects he was keenly alive, he wisely judged that it was a necessity, if his programme were to be executed, that the association of political power with landed possessions should be the sheet-anchor of his system; and, strong in the support afforded by that material bond of sympathy, he did not hesitate to ridicule the foibles of those “patricians”—­to use his own somewhat stilted expression—­who, whilst they sneered at his apparent eccentricities, despised their own chosen mouthpiece, and occasionally writhed under his yoke, were none the less so fascinated by the powerful will and keen intellect which held them captive that they blindly followed his lead, even to the verge of being duped.

From earliest youth to green old age his confidence in his own powers was never shaken.  He persistently acted up to the sentiment—­slightly paraphrased from Terence—­which he had characteristically adopted as his family motto, Forti nihil difficile; neither could there be any question as to the genuine nature either of his strength or his courage, albeit hostile critics might seek to confound the latter quality with sheer impudence.[70] He abhorred the commonplace, and it is notably this abhorrence which gives a vivid, albeit somewhat meretricious sparkle to his personality.  For although truth is generally dull, and although probably most of the reforms and changes which have really benefited mankind partake largely of the commonplace, the attraction of unconventionality and sensationalism cannot be denied.  Disraeli made English politics interesting, just as Ismail Pasha gave at one time a spurious interest to the politics of Egypt.  No one could tell what would be the next step taken by the juggler in Cairo or by that meteoric statesman in London whom John Bright once called “the great wizard of Buckinghamshire.”  When Disraeli disappeared from the stage, the atmosphere may have become clearer, and possibly more healthy for the body politic in the aggregate, but the level of interest fell, whilst the barometer of dulness rose.