and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and noble destiny."
Now Gladstone, whose influence upon the tone of public life was, as I still believe, far more elevating and ennobling than Disraeli's, was characterized by Disraeli as "a sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." Disraeli himself spoke of life as a "dazzling farce" and an engrossing "game." One does not quite like the gamester's attitude in a statesman. Disraeli was animated, at least in his earlier years, by a peacock vanity. Carlyle had taught us to think of him as a "superlative Hebrew conjurer," to be disdained even by a conservative, provided he were a serious and sober conservative. It was my impression that "Dizzy" and his literary works were dead, and well dead, and that it would never be really necessary to return to them.
But my friend was right. I left Gladstone at the end of the second volume; and my intention of reading the third volume is still serving as pavement in an overpaved place. Eventually I turned to Disraeli. Everyone was doing so, usually with a contemptuous fling at Gladstone, which pricked curiosity.
When I began the Monypenny-Buckle "Life of Benjamin Disraeli," I repeated, in little, the experience of his own contemporaries; and this is clearly a tribute to the biographers' dispassionate, gradual, exhaustive elaboration of their hero. I contemned him, I ridiculed him, I disapproved of
