when, installed in Downing Street, he proclaimed the advent of a new era in finance, many commercial men, who ought to have known better, began to speculate on the possibility of his being able to realize the expectations which he held forth. As for the large majority of the Derbyites, the faith they reposed in him was boundless, and he unhesitatingly promised them a long and secure lease of office if they would be implicitly guided by his counsels. In an evil hour they consented. A dull man's best chance of remaining honest, particularly in a speculative and cultivated age, is to stick fast to the political and religious creed in which he has been brought up. If he tries to reason, he is lost. He is caught by sophistries, which would be detected at the first glance by a trained mind of ordinary acuteness; and he is apt to plume himself on being a clever intriguer, when he is neither more nor less than a self-sufficient dupe. When Mr. Cayley, who in point of understanding is considerably above the average of his protectionist associates, indited a long epistle to the "Times" to prove that the free-trade resolution, in which the majority of them concurred, was to be interpreted in a non-natural sense, he evidently was not aware that he was merely reviving the style of casuistry which had been perinanently discredited by the "Provincial Letters;" and he forgot that the resolution in question being the result of a compromise, any denial or evasion of its plain meaning might be deemed dishonorable as well as Jesuitical. As for the magnates of QuarterSession, who went about playing "Vivian Grey," making light of principle, and talking of office as the only rational object of a sensible statesman; they needed a satirist like the famous Duchess of Marlborough, who, having got hold of the youthful production of a heavy nobleman in which his lordship had tried to be pleasant and profligate, reprinted it with a frontispiece representing an elephant dancing on the slack rope. A commonplace, decorous, and respectable politician, who forfeits his respectability, may be compared to an ugly woman who has lost her character. He has thenceforth nothing to fall back upon; and what Dr. Johnson calls the most poignant of all feelings, the remorse for a crime committed in vain, is all that is now left to many of the most prominent members of the "Country Party.' So firm, however, was their confidence in their "mystery-man," that it was not until some days after the promulgation of his Budget, that they began to entertain misgivings as to his infallibility. They were repeatedly warned that a coup de main in English finance would be a gross folly, if it were not fortunately a moral impossibility. They persevered in hoping against hope, that the something "looming in the future" would prove their salvation after all; and they could hardly credit their senses when they saw their financial Phaeton let go the reins and tumble headlong from his seat. His own astonishment was little inferior to theirs, for he thought his Budget a masterpiece, and is still, we are credibly informed, utterly at a loss to understand why it was unpopular with both town and country, and so rapidly precipitated his fall. The source of their credulity and his confirmed delusion may, we suspect, be traced to some of his personal habits and peculiarities, which are thus described by Mr. Francis: "Like Sir Robert Peel, he appears to isolate himself to have no associates in the House, except those forced on him by the immediate necessity of party. This isolation and self-absorption are equally conspicuous, whether he is quiescent or in activity. Observe him anywhere about the House, in the lobbies or in the committee-rooms; you never see him in confidential communication with any one." 66 A self-dependent and self-absorbed man betrays nothing; but, on the other hand, he learns nothing except from books, he loses the advantage of testing his measures or speculations by discussion, and the working everyday world of feeling and opinion remains a sealed volume to him. Depend upon it, sir," observed Dr. Johnson, in reference to Lord Loughborough, "it is when you come close to a man in conversation that you discover what his real abilities are; to make a speech in a public assembly is a knack. Now, I'honor Thurlow; Thurlow is a fine fellow; he fairly puts his mind to yours." 66 It has been surmised that Mr. Disraeli, in in this respect, bears a closer resemblance to Lord Loughborough than to Lord Thurlow. Nor, indeed, do we well see how he could go on playing his favorite part of mysteryman," if he were in the habit of putting mind to mind, or of conversing, in the full meaning of the word, with men and women who might fairly claim to stand on an intellectual level with him; which is a very different thing from talking over a Marquis of Carabas, or showing off to a select and not over-wise circle of worshippers. "I wish to Heaven that young man would risk himself," exclaimed Canning, on first hearing an embryo orator. The same wish must have risen repeatedly to the lips of many who have marked "Nature descends down to infinite smallness. Mr. has his parasites; and if you take a large buzzing blue-bottle fly, and look at it in a microscope, you may see twenty or thirty little ugly insects crawling about it, which doubtless think their fly to be the bluest, grandest, and most important animal in the universe, and are convinced the world would be at an end if it ceased to buzz." (Peter Plymley.) Mr. Disraeli's studied caution and absence of excitability at moments which seemed to invite the open and unrestrained interchange of sentiment and thought. Whatever inferences may be drawn from the silence or reserve of authors and heroes whose laurels have been earned in the closet or the field, there must be something wrong in the mental or moral conformation of a man who can make showy speeches in public, and who confessedly possesses a lively fancy, a well-stored memory and a remarkable command of language, yet cannot or will not "risk himself" in the animated and careless intercourse of cultivated society. There must be some designs and motives, or modes of thinking, which will not bear the light; or some weak point which he wishes to cover; or he dreads the consequences of any impulsive movement on his own part, or on that of an antagonist who may resolve to draw him out and try conclusions with him when he is not protected by the forms of parliamentary debate. maintaining that amplification, with an admixture of commonplace, is always unsuitable in a set speech. All that we venture to suggest is, that it is sometimes easier to dispense with solid materials, and to build on shallow foundations, in a popular assembly than at a dinner-table. The late Sir Robert Peel's reserve proceeded from a totally distinct cause, and implied high moral courage rather than a moral defect. It was his matured conviction, that a minister ought not to communicate his intentions or ineditated measures before the time fixed for their formal announcement; and he was content to endure any extent of obloquy rather than to break through what he deemed a salutary rule. He suffered bitterly from overpunctilious attention to it, and there was a period of his career, when a dash of Lord Melbourne's fascinating indiscretion would have been invaluable to the more sedate and cautious statesman. If he had gone about amongst the influential country gentlemen during the autumn of 1845, and frankly communicated the difficulty he felt in acting up to the expectations which he had permitted them to indulge as to the Corn Laws, very few, if any, would have sanctioned a factious combination to run him down. It would be curious if Mr. Disraeli, who rose by this very weakness of his illustrious victim, should find his own fall precipitated by an analogous fault of manner and disposition; which, in his case, must be too deeply rooted to be exchanged for the outward and visible signs of a non-existing congeniality. It is at all events clear, that if a party leader insists on playing the unseen oracle or the Oriential despot with his followers, he fearfully increases his responsibilities; for, if he fails, they will most assuredly exact ample atonement for the humiliation and disappointment which they have gone through. And fail he must, when he tries to delude a nation by the same arts which have enabled him to figure for a period as the organ and mouthpiece of a faction. A rhetorician devoid of earnestness, and anxious only for self-display, can hardly be subjected to a more embarrassing ordeal than that of good table-talk. Its sudden breaks, quick turns, and elliptical transitions, are fatal to his tactics. He is like a column of infantry vainly endeavoring to deploy into line under fire or he may be compared to Monsieur Jourdain, when, fresh from his fencing lesson, he is pinned against the wall by one of Toinette's home-thrusts. By way of illustrating our meaning, let us suppose that the substance of Mr. Disraeli's first speech on his Budget had been mentioned at a private party. If he had begun to argue there that the protectionists had never agitated for "Protection" since 1846, because they had never brought the question specifically before either house of Parliament, he would scarcely have been allowed to finish his sentence."What do you say then to C'Connell's omission to move for the Repeal of the Union? Does it follow that he never agitated for it?" would have been instantly and triumphantly retorted. Or, let us take another instance from his second speech on principles and new policies "on the 17th of the same subject, in which, it will be remem-July last, at Aylesbury, he had evidently not bered, in answer to the objection, that his reserved surplus of 400,000l. was virtually created by adding to the national debt, he expatiated on the abuses of the Loan Fund. If he had attempted such an evasion amongst friends, he would have been checked and told to keep to the point, namely, whether his surplus was or was not the product of a continuing credit. In short, his three, four, and five hours' orations would have been reduced to marvellously small dimensions if he had omitted everything which would have been deemed superfluous by a select company of financiers. But, of course, we must not be understood as When Mr. Disraeli announced his "new reflected that he was speaking as the finance minister of a mighty commercial empire, which would look for the realization of his pledge, and whose fiscal relations might be very seriously disturbed by it. We firmly believe that he had neither defined principles nor specific policies in his mind, when he thus took credit for a projected revision of taxation which would please everybody without displeasing anybody; but that he was simply indulging his habitual Cambyses' vein, and that he trusted to the chapter of accidents, or to his own versatility, for getting him out of the scrape when, if ever, the hour of reck reason to complain of circumstances, Mr. Disraeli, in our opinion, has been most materially indebted to them for his oratorical triumphs; and the chances are immeasurably against any project which he may entertain of being enabled to play over again the strange game of 1846. oning should actually arrive. Unluckily for pointed sarcasms tinkle harmlessly against him, people refused to believe that he could the impenetrable shield of Mr. Gladstone's so far have forgotten his change of position moral superiority, or fall upon the proud as to intend nothing more than an ad captan- crest of a high-minded and fearless antagonist. dum harangue; and when Parliament met, he of Lord John Russell's stamp, like the foam had no alternative but to introduce a Budget, of a breaker upon a rock. Far from having which, if not entirely original, should rise above commonplace, or to confess himself a charlatan. If he had regarded the well-understood interest of the Derby government, he would, notwithstanding, have rested satisfied with the quiet and unpretending applica tion of the calculated or anticipated surplus; but vanity overcame prudence; he could not When Walter Scott, on finding the demand bear to be twitted as the "bottle-conjurer,' ," for his poetry growing slack, commenced the and he brought forward a bundle of proposals Waverley novels, Byron said of him that, which have earned him a most unenviable if this new vein should fail or be exhausted, preeminence amongst finance-ministers, past, present, or to come. Horace Walpole relates that Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Bute's Chancellor of the Exchequer, opened his first and only Budget (for 1763) so injudiciously, and with so little intelligence of the exigencies of the period, that he himself was afterwards driven to admit his incapacity, and dolorously observed: "People will point at me and say, there goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared." Let the manes of this defunct financier be comforted; for Mr. Disraeli, considering his opportunities, will probably rank with posterity as the worst. Then how happened it that this miracle of ingenuity, who is believed to have had carte blanche from his colleagues, and was certainly checked by no conviction of his own-blundered so egregiously when his whole political fortunes, and those of his party, as well as his reputation for practical statesmanship which still trembled in the balance of public opinion, were at stake? Either a good or a popular Budget might have served his turn; and after three months' study, with all the aids and appliances of office, he produced one which proved both unsound and unpopular, nay, which, whilst running counter to every tory tradition, and tending to the subversion of the national credit, was coldly received by the agriculturalists and clamorously denounced by the town constituencies? The solution of the problem is that Mr. Disraeli never was, and never will be, a practical legislator or a statesman. He is emphatically a rhetorician, a man of words. There are few things that can be done by dint of words, which he cannot or will not do; but as for earnest thought, efficient action, well-defined aim, sound knowledge, or sincere purpose, he has none of them. Endowed with many choice endowments which are requisite to oratorical excellence, he ranks ineffably below the first class of orators who have illustrated our parliamentary history; and it is consolatory to every lover of truth to mark, how invariably his most polished and An his versatile and copious genius would enable him to strike out a third or a fourth road to renovated and redoubled popularity. equally acute and more experienced judge of intellectual capabilities-the late Richard Lalor Shiel - took a widely different view of Mr. Disraeli's resources when he remarked that the death of Sir Robert Peel had left his persecutor much in the condition of a dissecting surgeon without a subject. There were sundry peculiarities of character and position which rendered that lamented statesman both vulnerable and sensitive to a rare and exceptional degree; and the only branch of public speaking in which Mr. Disraeli has hitherto approximated to excellence is aggressive personality. The form may vary; it may be sarcasm, sneer, irony, ridicule, satire, or invective. But all his happiest efforts are marked by the same distinctive quality. He cannot shine without offensiveness. His passages of arms are not worth commemorating unless he draws blood. He cannot be ranked with debaters, like the late Charles Buller — Whose wit in the combat, as gentle as bright, Never carried a heartstain away on its blade. He is more fitted to be ranged in the same category with those who, "when they cannot wield the sword, snatch the dagger, and when they cannot barb it and make it rankle in the wound, steep it in venom, that it may fester in the scratch." He is the Paganini of the rhetorical art; and his renown as first fiddle depends on the skill and felicity with which he executes so many tunes, with variations, upon one string. We have carefully perused the whole of Mr. Disraeli's printed speeches, with the view of making a collection of their "beauties;" and the result of our search is even more unsatisfactory than we could have anticipated. They possess the high merit of lucidity in statement and narration; but they are deficient in arrangement, condensation, and logical connexion: the transitions are commonly forced, and the ornaments almost always meretricious. They neither instruct nor im prove. They do not make his hearers or readers wiser or better. They do not guide the judgment, enlighten the understanding, or exalt the feelings. As Cicero says of Epicurus, "Nil magnificum, nil generosum sapit." Judging either from internal evidence or from their known effects, we should infer that not one of them was seriously framed or intended to persuade or convince, or to advance any affirmative proposition, or any line of policy, or any measure of his own; but that the main aim of each was either to gratify his morbid fondness for notoriety, or to depreciate some individual who had wounded his vanity, stood in the way of his advancement, or provoked his enmity in some manner. For this reason he is most powerful in reply; the more especially because his choicest bits, his purpurei panni, are carefully prepared beforehand, and cannot easily be made to wear an impromptu air in an opening speech. -the phrase of "organized hypocrisy," as applied to the Peel administration at the same time the sneering remark in the Maynooth debate of 1845, that "with him (Peel) great measures were always rested on small precedents, that he always traced the steam-engine back to the tea-kettle that, in fact, all his precedents were tea-kettle precedents". the double-barrel discharged at the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert, by the warning, that "another place (the House of Lords) may be drilled into a guard-room, and the House of Commons into a vestry;" and the comparison of his illustrious victim, first, to a "great parliamentary middle-man," and subsequently to a "great appropriation clause." Equally cutting and well-chosen were his weapons when, returning again and again to the charge he advised Sir Robert to stick to quotation, because he never quoted any passage that had not previously received Most of the greatest speakers, ancient and the meed of parliamentary approbation"modern, have been eminent in the vituperative compared him to the Turkish admiral who branch of the art; but, to the best of our in- steered the fleet confided to him straight into formation and belief, it is not true of more than the enemy's port; and denounced him as a one or two of them that their highest triumphs" political pedlar, who, adopting the prinwere achieved in it, and it is true of none that ciples of free-trade, had bought his party in they entirely neglected the other branches, or the cheapest market, and sold them in the cultivated them without fruit. But not only dearest." These may be favorable specimens has Mr. Disraeli produced nothing comparable of wit, cleverness, fancy, keen observation, to Pitt's speech on the Slave Trade, or Fox's adroit application, or quick perception. But on the Westminster Scrutiny, or Burke's on their glitter and point are not more remarkthe American War, or Sheridan's on the Be-able than the worthlessness and heaviness of gums of Oude, or Grattan's on the Irish Dec- the materials in which they are imbedded, laration of Rights, or Plunkett's on the Cath- or on which they lie," like lumps of marl on olic question, or any one of Lord Lyndhurst's a barren moor, encumbering what they cannot or Lord Brougham's most admired effusions; fertilize." but, as regards purely ornamental rhetoric, no effort of his fancy deserves to be named in the same day with the glowing and graceful imagery of Canning-as in the well-known allusion to the ships in Plymouth harbor. The finest passage in this line which Mr. Francis can cull from his hero's orations, is the one in which he warns the Manchester school that "there is no reason why they should form an exception to that which history has mournfully recorded; why they, too, should not fade like the Tyrian dye, and moulder like the Venetian palaces." With regard to the distinctive character of Mr. Disraeli's eloquence, Mr. Francis' inquiries and researches have unconsciously led him to the same conclusion. Almost every paragraph, sentence, or phrase which he adduces to illustrate Mr. Disraeli's style, or to raise the critical estimate of his genius, is a personal attack - express, implied, involved, or insinuated. We will cite a few of the most remarkable quoted for this purpose by the partial biographer. He mentions, as eminently successful, the imputation levelled against the premier in 1844, of being" one who menaced his friends whilst he cringed to his opponents," Aware of the limits within which nature or habit had circumscribed the abilities of this remarkable personage, we were consequently by no means disposed, on the occasion of the famous Thiers' plagiarism, to give him credit for being able to compose an original eulogium on the "hero of a hundred fights," of equal or greater merit than what he stole readymade. He is by habit and frame of mind obstructive rather than constructive, better qualified for depreciating objects of popular esteem than for exalting them; and we happen to know that, prior to the detection of the theft, the stolen part (occupying between thirty-five and forty lines in the newspaper reports) of his Wellington performance, was exultingly adduced by his admirers to prove that he could shine, when it suited him, in a line for which he had been deemed radically unfit.* *The passages in question were first quoted in a translated shape in the " Morning Chronicle" of July 4, 1848, in refutation of some depreciatory We learn from the same paper of the 25th of November last, that the Right Honorable Gentleman has paid us also the high compliment of printing as his own some striking reflections of a celebrated. remarks of Mr. Disraeli's on the "military mind." ary distinction are there, who would accept Mr. Disraeli's position and reputation with the incidental drawbacks and qualifications? To reduce the number of those who might be be tempted to envy him, is the main object of this article; and it is with especial view to their edification that we have collected the scattered illustrations of his career from its commencement. Each, individually taken, may prove little; but when the whole of them are viewed together, and in connexion with one another, the conclusion is irresistible. His mode of rising in the world then becomes patent to the most cursory observer. He is henceforth like a bee, or wasp, working in a glass case. He has broken Sedley's We confidently appeal to any one who was present at the delivery of his studied attack on Sir Charles Wood and Sir James Graham, in reference to our relations with France, whether apart from its factious and mischievous spirit this exhibition was not prosy and wearisome in the extreme, till he began to let off the squibs and crackers which he had reserved for the finale, and most of which, as usual, exploded very much to the annoyance and confusion of his friends. With what face can they attribute revolutionary tendencies to the Aberdeen and Russell ministry, if, since its formation, “no radical can venture abroad for fear of being caught and converted into a conservative statesman?" or how can they affect dread of Sir James Graham's supplementary commandment —“Thou shalt progress," " if, as they were antithetically not be found out;" and every well-wisher to told, it consists in standing still." But his good government and social order should reclosing speech on his Budget affords the most joice in his detection. His twenty-seven years striking examples to show how habitually of public life are thus made to assume their and instinctively he resorts to sarcasm or genuine form of a tangled mass of disingenuvituperation when he is hard-pressed. He ous expedients and contradictory professions, had concentrated all his energies to leave a which change their color, like the hues of terrible impression of his beak and talons, as shot silk- fade into something else as we he alighted vulture-like on foe after foe. With are looking at them, like what are called the look, tone, and attitude of Kean's Shy-shifting views," or dazzle the eye like lock, he dealt about him like the Veiled the showy and indistinct figures in a kaleidProphetoscope. Is it just, wise, or beneficial that the highest honors of a State should be earned by such means or lavished on such men? 66 In vain he yells his desperate curses out; .could n't.'" game How many aspirants to political and literhistorian which originally appeared in this Journal. The peroration of his speech on the third reading of the Corn Bill, May 15, 1846, is a mere paraphrase of the concluding paragraphs of Mr. Urquhart's "Diplomatic Transactions in Central .Asia." - It is idle to assert that he won his way, fairly or unfairly, as a man of letters or "" gentleman of the press.' He won it as a parliamentary gladiator; and his books have done him more harm than good with his employers, who do not appreciate their merits, and are constantly liable to be annoyed by their satire or compromised by their revelations. We should no more think of ranking him with Mr. Macaulay, than of placing a successful general of Condottieri, like Sir John Hawkwood, in the same category with Condé, Turenne, and Marlborough. Let those to whom this judgment may seem harsh, reflect on the results which have ensued in a neighboring country, from the habitual disregard of the moral element in appreciating conduct or character, and from the premium thereby held out to unprincipled ambition. We are fortunately not yet arrived at that lamentable state of social degradation, in which there is no recognized criterion of excellence except success; but we shall rapidly approximate towards it if we tamely permit brazen images, or false idols, to be set up for national worship in the midst of us; whilst, to proclaim that any amount of interested tergiversation or apostasy should be forgiven for the sake of wit, eloquence, or adroit audacity, is to canker public virtue in the bud. The almost total absence of conventional restrictions and civil disabilities in this country, simply adds to the apprehended danger by |