h may easily degenerate into a
mere craving for notoriety, was unquestionably the spur which in his
case raised his "clear spirit." So early as 1833, on being asked upon
what principles he was going to stand at a forthcoming election, he
replied, "On my head." He cared, in fact, little for principles of any
kind, provided the goal of his ambition could be reached. Throughout his
career his main object was to rule his countrymen, and that object he
attained by the adoption of methods which, whether they be regarded as
tortuous or straightforward, morally justifiable or worthy of
condemnation, were of a surety eminently successful.

The interest in Mr. Monypenny's work is enormously enhanced by the
personality of his hero. In dealing with the careers of other English
statesmen--for instance, with Cromwell, Chatham, or Gladstone--we do,
indeed, glance--and more than glance--at the personality of the man, but
our mature judgment is, or at all events should be, formed mainly on his
measures. We inquire what was their ultimate result, and what effect
they produced? We ask ourselves what degree of foresight the statesman
displayed. Did he rightly gauge the true nature of the political,
economic, or social forces with which he had to deal, or did he mistake
the signs of the times and allow himself to be lured away by some
ephemeral will-o'-the-wisp in the pursuit of objects of secondary or
even fallacious importance? It is necessary to ask these questions in
dealing with the career of Disraeli, but this mental process is, in his
case, obscured to a very high degree by the absorbing personality of the
man. The individual fills the whole canvas almost to the extent of
excluding all other objects from view.

No tale of fiction is, indeed, more strange than that which tells how
this nimble-witted alien adventurer, with his poetic temperament, his
weird Eastern imagination and excessive Western cynicism, his elastic
mind which he himself described as "revolutionary," and his apparently
wayward but in reality carefully regulated unconventionality, succeeded,
in spite of every initial disadvantage of race, birth, manners, and
habits of thought, in dominating a proud aristocracy and using its
members as so many pawns on the chess-board which he had arranged to
suit his own purposes. Thrust into a society which was steeped in
conventionality, he enforced attention to his will by a studied neglect
of everything that was conventional. De