men out? His career on the whole impresses a Liberal less as a glory of the conservative principle than as a bewildering satire upon it. When he had chosen his part, he played it, to be sure, superbly, upholding as loyally as the bluest-blooded of old English nobles the prerogatives of the Crown, the prestige of the Church, the privileges of Parliament, and the predominance of the landed gentry. And yet behind the sallow mask, decorous and immobile, of the Earl of Beaconsfield who had refused a dukedom, there was seldom absent a suggestion of silent, mocking Semitic laughter. Says Bertie Tremaine in "Endymion," the last novel of one whose deadly banter had made him minister: "Men destined to the highest places should beware of badinage. . . . An insular country subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen. "Now, the best place from which to laugh at Bourbons is their throne.
Disraeli was not born an English Tory. He was born an emancipated Jew, the son of an emancipated Jew. His father Isaac, the literary antiquarian, had withdrawn from business because it bored him, had withdrawn from the synagogue because it annoyed him, had baptized his children because conformity was convenient, and had kept out of politics and other engagements in order to enjoy in the isolation of his rich library the free play of his curious, volatile, speculative mind. By his intellectual detachment, if not by his universal knowledge, he might have served as a model for the omniscient Sidonia
