But it could not be.  His own conception of history made this impossible.  It is well said that he planned his history “on the scale of an ordnance map.”  He did what a German professor does when he tries to fathom English society by studying the Times newspaper day by day.  The enormous mass of detail, the infinitesimal minuteness of view, beat him.  As he complained about Samuel Johnson, he runs into “big words about little things.”  Charles’s mistress, her pug-dog, the page-boy who tended the dog, nay, the boy’s putative father, occupy the foreground:  and the poet, the statesman, and the hero retire into the middle distance or the background.  What would we not have given to have had Macaulay’s History of England continued down to his own time, the wars of Marlborough, the reign of Anne, the poets, wits, romancers, inventors, reformers, and heroes of the eighteenth century, the careers of Walpole, Chatham, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Nelson, Wellington, Brougham, Bentham, and Canning—­the formation of the British Empire—­the great revolutionary struggle in Europe!  The one thought which dims our enjoyment of this fascinating collection of memoirs, and these veracious historical romances, is the sense of what we might have had, if their author had been a great historian as well as a magnificent literary artist.

[1] Froude’s Carlyle, i. 192.

IV

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

In the blaze of the political reputation of the Earl of Beaconsfield we are too apt to overlook the literary claims of Benjamin Disraeli.  But many of those who have small sympathy with his career as a statesman find a keen relish in certain of his writings; and it is hardly a paradox to augur that in a few generations more the former chief of the new Tory Democracy may have become a tradition, whilst certain of his social satires may continue to be widely read.  Bolingbroke, Swift, Sheridan, and Macaulay live in English literature, but are little remembered as politicians; and Burke, the philosopher, grows larger in power over our thoughts, as Burke, the party orator, becomes less and less by time.  We do not talk of Viscount St. Albans, the learned Chancellor:  we speak only of Bacon, the brilliant writer, the potent thinker.  And so perhaps in the next century, we shall hear less of Lord Beaconsfield, the Imperial Prime Minister:  but Benjamin Disraeli’s pictures of English society and the British Parliament may still amuse and instruct our descendants.

It is true that the permanent parts of his twenty works may prove to be small.  Pictures, vignettes, sketches, epigrams will survive rather than elaborate works of art; these gems of wit and fancy will have to be picked out of a mass of rubbish; and they will be enjoyed for their vivacious originality and Voltairean pungency, not as masterpieces or complete creations.  That Disraeli wrote much stuff is true enough.