issued from his fertile mint. This turn for epigram, not common in
England, sometimes led him into scrapes which would have damaged a man
of less imperturbable coolness. No one else could have ventured to
say, when he had induced the Tories to pass a Reform Bill stronger
than the one they had rejected from the Liberals in the preceding
year, that it had been his mission "to educate his party." Some of
his opponents professed to be shocked by such audacity, and many
old Tories privily gnashed their teeth. But the country received the
dictum in the spirit in which it was spoken. "It was Disraeli all
over."

If his intellect was not of wide range, it was within its range a
weapon of the finest flexibility and temper. It was ingenious, ready,
incisive. It detected in a moment the weak point, if not of an
argument, yet of an attitude or of a character. Its imaginative
quality made it often picturesque, sometimes even impressive. Disraeli
had the artist's delight in a situation for its own sake, and what
people censured as insincerity or frivolity was frequently only the
zest which he felt in posing, not so much because there was anything
to be gained, as because he realised his aptitude for improvising a
new part in the drama which he always felt himself to be playing. The
humour of the situation was too good to be wasted. Perhaps this love
of merry mischief may have had something to do with his tendency to
confer honours on those whom the world thought least deserving.

His books are not only a valuable revelation of his mind, but have
more literary merit than critics have commonly allowed to them,
perhaps because we are apt, when a man excels in one walk, to deem
him to have failed in any other wherein he does not reach the same
level. The novels foam over with cleverness; indeed, _Vivian Grey_,
with all its youthful faults, gives as great an impression of
intellectual brilliance as does anything Disraeli ever wrote or spoke.
Their easy fertility makes them seem to be only, so to speak, a few
sketches out of a large portfolio. There is some variety in the
subjects--_Contarini Fleming_ and _Tancred_ are more romantic than the
others, _Sybil_ and _Coningsby_ more political--as well as in the
merits of the stories. The two latest, _Lothair_ and _Endymion_,
works of his old age, are markedly inferior in spirit and invention;
but the general features are the same in all--a lively fancy, a knack
of hitting characters off in