one, from the day that Parliament tried to
laugh him down. After that if any one wanted to hear him they had to come
to him, and he took good care that those who did come did not go away
empty. He never explained the evident, illustrated the obvious, nor
expatiated on the irrelevant.

However, the motto, "Impudence rather than servility," was not discarded.
Instead of a dashing style he developed a slow, subtle, scathing quality
that was quite lost on all, save those who gave themselves to close
listening.

And the House listened, for when Disraeli went after an antagonist he
chose an antlered stag. If little men, fiercely effervescent and
childishly inconsequential, attempted to reply to him or sought to engage
him in debate, he simply answered them with silence, or that tantalizing
smile.

O'Connell and Disraeli, although unlike, had much in common and should
have been fast friends. Surely the age and distinguished record of
O'Connell must have commanded Disraeli's respect, but we know how they
grappled in wordy warfare. Disraeli called the Irishman an incendiary, and
O'Connell, who was a past master in abuse, replied in a speech wherein he
exhausted the Billingsgate lexicon. He wound up by a reference to the
ancestry of his opponent, and a suggestion that "this renegade Jew is
descended from the impenitent thief, whose name was doubtless Disraeli."
It was a home-thrust--a picture so exaggerated and overdrawn that all
England laughed. The very extravagance of the simile should have saved the
allusion from resentment; but it touched Disraeli in his most sensitive
spot--his pride of birth.

He straightway challenged his traducer. O'Connell had killed a man in a
duel years before, and then vowed he would never again engage in mortal
combat.

Disraeli intimated that he would fight O'Connell's son, Morgan, if
preferred, a man of his own age.

Morgan replied that his father insulted so many men he could not set the
precedent of fighting them all, or standing sponsor for an indiscreet
parent. But with genuine Irish spirit he suggested that if the son of
Abraham was intent on fight and could not be persuaded to be sensible,
why, the matter could probably be arranged.

Happily, about this time, police officers invaded the apartments of
Disraeli and arrested him on a bench-warrant. He was bound over, to his
great relief, in the sum of five hundred pounds to keep the peace.

O'Connell never took the matter very serious