thought of the profuse and idle minions of splendor who paraded his pages he actually put into the mouth of Millbank, the Manchester manufacturer in "Coningsby":
"Is it not monstrous, then, that a small number of men, several of whom take the titles of Duke and Earl from towns in this very neighbourhood, towns which they never saw, which never heard of them, which they did not form, or build, or establish, I say is it not monstrous, that individuals so circumstanced, should be invested with the highest of conceivable privileges, the privilege of making laws? Dukes and Earls indeed! I say there is nothing in a masquerade more ridiculous."
Disraeli, like all of the "dark sex," was sensible to "female loveliness;" but probably no Jewish intellectual who ever lived could long be dazzled by good looks in a man, when unaccompanied by adequate mental equipment. Of Lord Deloraine, the gartered viceroy in "Sybil," he remarks demurely: "He might have been selected as the personification of aristocracy: so noble was his appearance. . . . He was also very accomplished and not ill-informed; had read a little, and thought a little, and was in every respect a superior man." Superior he was, presumably, to the Warwickshire peer in the same novel, who had thought not at all, and who, when confronted with the idea of social betterment, gasped indignantly: "Well, that is sheer radicalism—pretending that the people can be better off than they are, is radicalism and nothing else." Everyone
