peeches and
books. This entire game of life is to him only a diversion.

They may jeer him down in the House of Commons, but his patience is
unruffled. He says, "Very well, I will wait." Now and again he smiles that
wondrous, contagious smile, showing his white teeth and the depth of his
dark, burning eyes.

He knows his power. He revels in the wit he never expresses; he glories in
this bright blade of the intellect that is never fully unsheathed.

They think he is interested in English politics--pish! Only world problems
really interest him, and those that lie behind mean as much to him as
those that are to come. He is one with eternity, and the vanquished glory
of Rome, the marble beauty of Athens, the Assyrian Sphinx, the flight from
Egypt under the leadership of one who had killed his man--yet had talked
with God face to face--these and the dim uncertainty of the unseen, are
the things that interest him. He is a dreamer of the Ghetto.

* * * * *

There was no taint of mixed blood in the veins of Benjamin Disraeli. He
traced his ancestry in a record that looks like a chapter from the Book of
Numbers. His forebears had known every persecution, every contumely,
slight and disgrace. Driven from Spain by the Inquisition, barely escaping
with life, when Jewish blood actually fertilized the fields about Granada,
his direct ancestor became one of the builders of Venice. The Jews
practically controlled the trade of the world in the sun-kissed days of
prosperity, when Venice produced the books and the art of Christendom.

To trace an ancestry back to those who enthroned Venice on her hundred
isles was surely something of which to be proud; and into the blood of
Benjamin Disraeli went a dash of the gleam and glory and glamour of
Venice--the Venice of the Doges.

This man's grandfather came to England with a goodly fortune, which he
managed to increase as the years went by. He had one son, Isaac, who
nearly broke his parents' heart in that he not only showed no aptitude for
business, but actually wrote poems wherein commerce was held up to
ridicule. The tendency of the artistic nature to speak with disdain of the
"mere money-grabber," and the habit of the "money-grabber" to refer
patronizingly to the helpless, theoretical and dreamy artist, is well
known. Isaac Disraeli was an artist in feeling; he must have been a
reincarnation of one of those bookmakers of Venice who touched hands with
Ti