ying his master."

Other utterances of a similar nature abound, as, for instance, when he
spoke of Lord Melbourne as "sauntering over the destinies of a nation,
and lounging away the glories of an Empire," or when he likened those
Tories who followed Sir Robert Peel to the Saxons converted by
Charlemagne. "The old chronicler informs us they were converted in
battalions and baptized in platoons."

Warned by the fiasco of his first speech in the House of Commons,
Disraeli for some while afterwards exercised a wise parsimony in the
display of his wit. He discovered that "the House will not allow a man
to be a wit and an orator unless they have the credit of finding it
out." But when he had once established his position and gained the ear
of the House, he gave a free rein to his prodigious powers of satire,
which he used to the full in his attacks on Peel. In point of fact,
vituperation and sarcasm were his chief weapons of offence. He spoke of
Mr. Roebuck as a "meagre-minded rebel," and called Campbell, who was
afterwards Lord Chancellor, "a shrewd, coarse, manoeuvring Pict," a
"base-born Scotchman," and a "booing, fawning, jobbing progeny of haggis
and cockaleekie." When he ceased to be witty, sarcastic, or
vituperative, he became turgid. Nothing could be more witty than when,
in allusion to Peel's borrowing the ideas of others, he spoke of his
fiscal project as "Popkins's Plan," but when, having once made this hit,
which naturally elicited "peals of laughter from all parts of the
House," he proceeded further, he at once lapsed into cheap rhetoric.

"Is England," he said, "to be governed, and is England to be
convulsed, by Popkins's plan? Will he go to the country with it?
Will he go with it to that ancient and famous England that once was
governed by statesmen--by Burleighs and by Walsinghams; by
Bolingbrokes and by Walpoles; by a Chatham and a Canning--will he
go to it with this fantastic scheming of some presumptuous pedant?
I won't believe it. I have that confidence in the common sense, I
will say the common spirit of our countrymen, that I believe they
will not long endure this huckstering tyranny of the Treasury
Bench--these political pedlars that bought their party in the
cheapest market and sold us in the dearest."

So also on one occasion when in a characteristically fanciful flight he
said that Canning ruled the House of Commons "as a man rules a high-bre