fawning, jobbing progeny of haggis and cockaleekie.”  When he ceased to be witty, sarcastic, or vituperative, he became turgid.  Nothing could be more witty than when, in allusion to Peel’s borrowing the ideas of others, he spoke of his fiscal project as “Popkins’s Plan,” but when, having once made this hit, which naturally elicited “peals of laughter from all parts of the House,” he proceeded further, he at once lapsed into cheap rhetoric.

“Is England,” he said, “to be governed, and is England to be convulsed, by Popkins’s plan?  Will he go to the country with it?  Will he go with it to that ancient and famous England that once was governed by statesmen—­by Burleighs and by Walsinghams; by Bolingbrokes and by Walpoles; by a Chatham and a Canning—­will he go to it with this fantastic scheming of some presumptuous pedant?  I won’t believe it.  I have that confidence in the common sense, I will say the common spirit of our countrymen, that I believe they will not long endure this huckstering tyranny of the Treasury Bench—­these political pedlars that bought their party in the cheapest market and sold us in the dearest.”

So also on one occasion when in a characteristically fanciful flight he said that Canning ruled the House of Commons “as a man rules a high-bred steed, as Alexander ruled Bucephalus,” and when some member of the House indulged in a very legitimate laugh, he turned on him at once and said, “I thank that honourable gentleman for his laugh.  The pulse of the national heart does not beat as high as once it did.  I know the temper of this House is not as spirited and brave as it was, nor am I surprised, when the vulture rules where once the eagle reigned.”  From the days of Horace downwards it has been permitted to actors and orators to pass rapidly from the comic to the tumid strain.[72] But in this case the language was so bombastic and so utterly out of proportion to the occasion which called it forth that a critic of style will hardly acquit the orator of the charge of turgidity.  Mr. Monypenny recognises that “in spite of Disraeli’s strong grasp of fact, his keen sense of the ridiculous, and his intolerance of cant, he never could quite distinguish between the genuine and the counterfeit either in language or sentiment.”

Much has at times been said and written of the solecisms for which Disraeli was famous.  They came naturally to him.  In his early youth he told his sister that the Danube was an “uncouth stream,” because “its bed is far too considerable for its volume.”  At the same time there can be little doubt that his practice of indulging in carefully prepared solecisms, which became more daring as he advanced in power, was part of a deliberate and perfectly legitimate plan, conceived with the object of arresting the attention and stimulating the interest of his audience.

* * * * *

I have so far only dealt with Disraeli’s main object in life, and with the methods by which he endeavoured to attain that object.  The important question remains to be considered of whether, as many supposed and still suppose, Disraeli was a mere political charlatan, or whether, as others hold, he was a far-seeing statesman and profound thinker, who read the signs of the times more clearly than his contemporaries, and who was the early apostle of a political creed which his countrymen will do well to adopt and develop.