oyer of the old Whig oligarchy
and the founder of the new Tory democracy, as a man of Jewish birth and
alien race, as a man to whom satire was the normal weapon and bombastic
affectation a deliberate expedient for dazzling the weak--Disraeli,
even in his writings, has been exposed in England to a bitter system of
disparagement which blinds partisans to their real literary merit. His
political opponents, and they are many and savage, can see little to
admire in his strange romances: his political worshippers and
followers, who took him seriously as a great statesman, are not fond of
imagining their hero as an airy satirist. His romances as well as his
satires are wholly unlike anything English; and though he had brilliant
literary powers, he never acquired any serious literary education.
Much as he had read, he had no learning, and no systematic knowledge of
any kind. He was never, strictly speaking, even an accurate master of
literary English. He would slip, as it were, unconsciously, into
foreign idioms and obsolete words. In America, where his name arouses
no political prejudice, he is better judged. To the Englishman, at
least to the pedant, he is still a somewhat elaborate jest.

Let us put aside every bias of political sympathy and anything that we
know or suspect of the nature of the man, and we may find in the
writer, Benjamin Disraeli, certain very rare qualities which justify
his immense popularity in America, and which ought to maintain it in
England. In his preface to _Lothair_ (October 1870), he proudly said
that it had been "more extensively read both by the people of the
United Kingdom and the United States than any work that has appeared
for the last half century." This singular popularity must have a
ground. Disraeli, in truth, belongs to that very small group of real
political satirists of whom Swift is the type. He is not the equal of
the terrible Dean; but it may be doubted if any Englishman since Swift
has had the same power of presenting vivid pictures and decisive
criticisms of the political and social organism of his times. It is
this Aristophanic gift which Swift had. Voltaire, Montesquieu,
Rabelais, Diderot, Heine, Beaumarchais had it. Carlyle had it for
other ages, and in a historic spirit. There have been far greater
satirists, men like Fielding and Thackeray, who have drawn far more
powerful pictures of particular characters, foibles, or social
maladies. But since Swift we have