oblem with more than one aspect. What was the true character of the
man who had sustained such a part? Did he hold any principles, or was
he merely playing with them as counters? By what gifts or arts did he
win such a success? Was there really a mystery beneath the wizard's
robe which he delighted to wrap around him? And how, being so unlike
the Englishmen among whom his lot was cast, did he so fascinate and
rule them?

Imagine a man of strong will and brilliant intellectual powers,
belonging to an ancient and persecuted race, who finds himself born
in a foreign country, amid a people for whose ideas and habits he
has no sympathy and scant respect. Suppose him proud, ambitious,
self-confident--too ambitious to rest content in a private station,
so self-confident as to believe that he can win whatever he aspires
to. To achieve success, he must bend his pride, must use the language
and humour the prejudices of those he has to deal with; while his
pride avenges itself by silent scorn or thinly disguised irony.
Accustomed to observe things from without, he discerns the weak
points of all political parties, the hollowness of institutions and
watchwords, the instability of popular passion. If his imagination be
more susceptible than his emotions, his intellect more active than
his conscience, the isolation in which he stands and the superior
insight it affords him may render him cold, calculating, self-centred.
The sentiment of personal honour may remain, because his pride will
support it; and he will be tenacious of the ideas which he has
struck out, because they are his own. But for ordinary principles of
conduct he may have small regard, because he has not grown up
under the conventional morality of the time and nation, but has
looked on it merely as a phenomenon to be recognised and reckoned
with, because he has noted how much there is in it of unreality or
pharisaism--how far it sometimes is from representing or expressing
either the higher judgments of philosophy or the higher precepts of
religion. Realising and perhaps exaggerating the power of his own
intelligence, he will secretly revolve schemes of ambition wherein
genius, uncontrolled by fears or by conscience, makes all things bend
to its purposes, till the scruples and hesitations of common humanity
seem to him only parts of men's cowardice or stupidity. What
success he will win when he comes to carry out such schemes in
practice will largely depend on the circ