"CONINGSBY."

17

expenses of the captain of the school. The last celebration was in 1844; and when the Prince Consort's carriage was stopped on Windsor Bridge, he royally gave the salt-bearer a hundred pounds. But the railway killed the Montem; for your young Etonians could not stop a train for salt. Similarly, the youthful politicians of Coningsby, with all their boyish grace and fluency, could not arrest the settled progress of affairs in England. And so, as a political manifesto, the brilliant book was of small value; and its author had to try a new combination, which turned out more successful.

Another idea which Mr. Disraeli has enforced in Coningsby, and again in Tancred, is the superiority of the Hebrew race to all others.

"The Hebrew," he tells us, "is an unmixed race. Doubtless, among the tribes who inhabit the bosom of the desert, progenitors alike of the Mosaic and the Mahomedan Arabs, blood may be found as pure as that of the Sheik Abraham. But the Mosaic Arabs are the most ancient, if not the only, unmixed blood that dwells in cities. An unmixed race of a

Such

first-rate organisation are the aristocracy of Nature. excellence is a positive fact; not an imagination, a ceremony, coined by poets, blazoned by cozening heralds, but perceptible in its physical advantages, and in the vigour of its unsullied idiosyncrasy."

Again, hear Sidonia lecture

"Do you think that the quiet, humdrum persecution of a decorous representative of an English University can crush those who have successfully baffled the Pharaohs, Nebuchadnezzars, Rome, and the Feudal Ages? The fact is, you cannot destroy a pure race of the Caucasian organisation."

And he proceeds to say that all Jews are essentially

VOL. II.

B

Tories; that the first Jesuits were Jews; that half the professors of Germany are Jews; that leading statesmen in Russia, Spain, France, Prussia, are Jews; that Hebrew blood ran in the veins of the most famous marshals of Napoleon. Not satisfied with this troop of professors, warriors, rulers, Sidonia claims the opera as wholly Hebrew.

"Enough for us that the three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions all nations at this moment yield. -Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn-are of the Hebrew race; and little do your men of fashion, your muscadins of Paris, and your dandies of London, as they thrill into raptures at the notes of a Pasta or a Grisi-little do they suspect that they are offering their homage to the sweet singers of Israel!'

This theory befits one whose ancestor invented for his family the fanciful name of D'Israeli.1

But Coningsby has more in it than these wild theories. Although incapable of complete self-restraint, Disraeli began to curb his eccentricities in this book. He set his hand firmly to caustic portraiture of character. Take his sketch of Rigby, who represents John Wilson Croker.

"He was just the animal that Lord Monmouth wanted; for Lord Monmouth always looked upon human nature with the callous eye of a jockey. He surveyed Rigby, and he determined to buy him. He bought him with his clear head, his indefatigable industry, his audacious tongue, and his ready and unscrupulous pen-with all his dates, all his lampoons, all his private memoirs, and all his political in

1 Had Mortimer Collins survived to the present date, how many singular instances of fulfilled political prophecy might he have quoted from Tancred.-T. T.

CHARACTERS IN " CONINGSBY."

19

trigues. It was a good purchase. Rigby became a great personage and Lord Monmouth's man."

Well, "the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," and a recent satirist has described the author of Coningsby as “A genius servile to a brilliant peer.”

One cannot resist the temptation of picking up a few epigrammatic gems from the pages of Disraeli's most brilliant book. Like Aladdin in his cave, we encounter an embarrassing amount of wealth. When Coningsby, his mind full of the perplexities of youth, went for guidance to Mr. Rigby, that gentleman explained to him that want of religious faith was solely occasioned by want of churches; and want of loyalty by the king's having shut himself up too much at the Cottage in Windsor Park. Build more churches, and let the king go in state to Ascot, and faith and loyalty will return. Panaceas of the same sort are seriously propounded even now. "Finally, Mr. Rigby impressed on Coningsby to read the Quarterly Review with great attention, and to make himself master of Mr. Wordy's History of the late War, in twenty volumes, a capital work, which proves that Providence was on the side of the Tories." We need hardly say that Mr. Wordy represents the late respected Sir Archibald Alison.

It might do good to the Conservative camp-followers, if they could be made to understand how thoroughly their commander-in-chief despises them.

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"The death of the king" [William IV.], writes Disraeli, was a great blow to the Conservative cause; that is to say, it darkened the brow of Tadpole, quailed the heart of Taper, crushed all the rising hopes of those numerous statesmen who believe the country must be saved if they receive twelve

hundred a year. It is a peculiar class that; twelve hundred per annum, paid quarterly, is their idea of political science and human nature. To receive twelve hundred per annum is government; to try to receive twelve hundred per annum is opposition; to wish to receive twelve hundred per annum is ambition."

These definitions are not quite out of date.

Sybil; or, The Two Nations, published in 1845, bears on its title-page a significant sentence from plain-spoken Bishop Latimer: "The commonalty murmured, and said, 'There never were so many gentlemen, and so little gentleness.' The two nations are the rich and the poor; and it has always appeared to us that in Sybil, where the contrasts are strong and well defined, our author has shown greatest earnestness and higher art than in any of his other works. The reader is apt to grow weary of the long train of stately Peeresses and their beautiful daughters, who spend their serene hours in sumptuous saloons and ornate gardens-of the troops of radiant young men, handsome as Hyperion, dauntless as Bayard, wittier than Sheridan. It is a relief to get into a manufacturing town, to learn something of starvation and misery, to read vivid descriptions of a trade-union and a strike. The lounging classes are contrasted with the working classes, and it is powerfully shown how the latter are transformed into the dangerous classes. Mr. Dickens himself has no transcript of life more accurate than Mr. Disraeli's picture of the town of Mowbray in its prosperity and its adversity. Thackeray's Cave of Harmony is not a more brilliant sketch than Disraeli's of the Temple, that marvellous place of entertainment, kept by Chaffing Jack. The miners, oppressed by their "butties," and obliged to take

their wages in "tommy," the lock-makers of Hellhouse Yard, ruled over by a Bishop, are vividly described, and without a touch of exaggeration. Mr. Disraeli, possessing an imagination capable of such work, does himself wrong by lingering in the oppressive atmosphere of splendour and satiety. He is not to be accused of flunkeyism: he depicts society which he knows and in which he is conspicuous; but the affair grows rather wearisome when, with the exception of attorneys and cabmen, the least considerable personage you encounter is the bishop of the diocese, who, as is well known to the learned, takes rank after the younger sons of Marquises.

About two decades passed between The Young Duke and Tancred, about the same between Tancred and Lothair; and in all three of these Mr. Disraeli has dealt with a theme which seems strongly to attract him—the coming of age of an English noble with vast estates. St. James is a Duke; Tancred, eldest son of a Duke; Lothair appears to be a Marquis or an Earl, but we get no definite information of his rank. The Young Duke of Disraeli's boyhood has for guardian Mr. Dacre, a Catholic gentleman of ancient family and large fortune, but is for the most part under the influence of his uncle, Lord Fitzpompey, a Tory noble, who votes fervently against the Catholics, and has several daughters. Tancred needs no guardian; but his rather feeble father, the Duke of Bellamont, has an acute adviser in Lord Eskdale, a well-executed likeness of Lord Lonsdale. Lothair, finally, has a couple of guardians—one an Anglican clergyman, who has gone over to Rome and become a Cardinal, and the other a Scottish Peer, a determined Whig and Presbyterian.