To touch on the economic aspects of Disraeli's adventure is to hint at a "seamy side" of life in the grand style, at what might have been, for a tender economic conscience, a kind of sham and ignominy embittering the external show. But Disraeli's conscience was not tender. Perhaps it had been toughened by recollection of the debts of other great prime ministers. Perhaps it had been prepared, spiritually prepared, by Lord Byron, who had looked at these pecuniary matters in a cool realistic way, or, as we should say nowadays, in a Butlerian way:
The unexpected death of some old lady
Or gentleman of seventy years complete,
Who've made "us youth" wait too—too long already
For an estate, or cash, or country seat.
Toughness, tenacity, relentless aggressiveness, and a diabolically cool remorseless wit had characterized Disraeli's approach to power in Parliament. According to his reputation and his record, copiously illustrated in the "Life," he was one of the most finished and formidable debaters who ever rose in the House. A great part of his forty years of public life he was in Opposition; and the business of an Opposition, as his biographer reminds us, is to oppose. At this task he was a matchless master. When he had perfected his style, his favorite technique at the crucial points of his philippics was in the manner of Tybalt's sword play: One! Two!—a flourish of a cambric handkerchief—and the third
