murmurs: "Beautiful is virtue, and charm is ingratiating; but power, after all, is the source of all the charms and all the virtues, without which all the virtues and all the charms are but idle attitudes and futile gesticulations." Disraeli refreshes, delights and inspirits us because his life is a perpetually varied exhibition of successful power, in literature, in society, in politics—power overcoming difficulties, surmounting obstacles, setting itself almost inaccessible objectives, and attaining them by fertile resources and indefatigable tenacity. The pursuit of power and its perquisites and its glories was Disraeli's religion. It is one manifestation of his spirit which is untainted with a touch of insincerity. It is the dominating passion that unifies his life and illuminates all that is mysterious and paradoxical in his utterances and in his career.
The critic who centres his attention on the old prime minister, Earl of Beaconsfield and lord of Hughenden Manor, may attempt a unification by thinking of him as essentially a natural born Tory and, as Mr. Buckle calls him, an "aristocrat to the bone." It will not do. No one can dissipate the "mystery" of Disraeli who forgets for a moment that he was, like the first Napoleon, an adventurer risen from the people. What does he prove—that the aristocratic system welcomes such men as Disraeli, or that the aristocratic system can't keep such
