and conduct of its "lost leader." Disraeli did indeed do something to liberalize the institutions of England and to prepare the way for that radically free aristocracy which his free Jewish intellect approved as the ideal form of society, as the truly conservative form. But he lowered the tone of his leadership, he corrupted the influence which he exerted upon his generation, by his public subscription to outworn conservative cant, by sacrificing his professed principles to momentary expediencies, by seeming always to yield to the pressure of liberal circumstances and the deep liberal current of the time grudgingly, fatalistically, cynically. The politician and the statesman ring hollow, like something which resembles an Ionic column of Ferrara but is really a stucco-coated contrivance of lath and plaster. Gladstone and Wordsworth were right when they agreed that "a man's personal character ought to be the basis of his politics." Disraeli's politics were not grounded squarely upon that basis.
Let us acknowledge that in this case the duplicity of the statesman is the peculiar spice of the novelist, and that our generation is just beginning to recognize how spicy Disraeli's novels are. Professor Saintsbury gives them but a paragraph in his history of literature in the nineteenth century; yet he remarks significantly that "good judges, differing widely in political and literary tastes, have found
