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thirty-three years was slowly dying. His wife's illness was long and harassing; it terminated in December 1872. To Lady Beaconsfield he owed ease and happiness. She had been the most discreet and faithful of friends throughout their married life. In his reply to a letter of condolence from Mr Gladstone he wrote, Marriage is the greatest earthly happiness when founded on complete sympathy. That hallowed lot was mine for a moiety of my existence, and I know it is yours.' These were not vain words. Without the companionship of a woman Disraeli was lost. These volumes are full of letters that prove it. For, although he had friends, intimacy with a man was foreign to his nature. The riddle of his sentiment for the Forrester sisters is simply solved by the application of this test. His affection for Monty Corry was deep. 'I never wanted you more,' he writes on one occasion; but he explains on another, in writing to Lady Bradford, how skin-deep this want really was. He speaks of the Duc d'Aumale as his 'most intimate friend,' and yet their orbits in life rarely intersected. In writing to Sir Nathaniel Rothschild he used sometimes endearing expressions, but they meant little more than a passing gust of affection. He was attached to Lord Barrington by many ties, but none of them strained at his heart. 'My nature demands that my life should be perpetual love,' he said in his youth. He meant the love of woman. But for his wife's companionship, there never was a lonelier man. Lady Beaconsfield, in a touching letter written years before but found by him after her death, urges him not to live alone, and earnestly hopes he may find some one as attached to him as herself.

Yet, like so many men of vivid imagination, he loved women without passion. He saw them too, as he saw so many aspects of life and politics, as he wished to see them. His serio-comic, ironically mystic mind was free from cynicism. He was curiously lacking in a visual sense of beauty, although the gorgeous appealed to his oriental imagination. He certainly preferred his peacocks to birds of lowlier plumage; and, although the tradition of the primrose has been fastened upon him, there can be little doubt that his heart went out more freely to the bouquet of roses and orchids ornamented

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with humming birds sent him for presentation to the Princess of Wales when he entertained her at dinner. It was not physical charm that attracted him to his wife, who was twelve years older than he. Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, the recipients of the ardent letters, many quotations from which appear in Mr Buckle's volumes, were aged respectively seventy and fifty-five. Yet he writes to them both like a lover. Perhaps the secret lies in words he uses in one of his most love-lorn epistles to Lady Bradford. Unfortunately for me my imagination did not desert me with my youth.' Both these ladies were great ladies of the type Disraeli describes in the novels of his youth and age—charming, intelligent, unassertive, appreciative women, always beautifully dressed, but no longer beautiful. Disraeli was no fop or fool in old age, any more than he was a libertine in youth. But he loved women and their friendship. He treated every woman as if she were a Queen, and he treated the Queen like a woman. He took endless pains-this was the secret, and a simple one, of his successes.

For some time after Lady Beaconsfield died Disraeli was miserable. His income, never adequate to his tastes, was materially diminished, for the greater part of it died with her. He left his comfortable and sunny house in Grosvenor Gate, and lived in Edwards' Hotel, near Hanover Square; and its associations with Lady Palmerston, whose house it had been when she was Lady Cowper, could not reconcile him to its dreariness. 'I have no home,' he wrote to Lord Malmesbury, ' and, when I tell my coachman to drive home, I feel it is a mockery. Hotel life of an evening is a cave of despair.' When at Hughenden he was always alone. For a whole month, he wrote to Northcote, he had not interchanged a word with a human being. He thought it a melancholy life, but he found society duller. A letter from Lord John Manners was like the sight of a sail to one on a desert isle. He spent days looking through and arranging Lady Beaconsfield's correspondence. She had kept everything; and everything meant letters from every man famous in the literature and politics of Europe for thirty years. Metternich, Thiers, Brougham, 100 from Bulwer Lytton,' he writes to Monty Corry, as many

from Stanley beginning with Trinity College; enough of George Smythe for three volumes, and I dare say not a line in them not as good as Horace Walpole.' The last letter from d'Orsay written just before his death, and many from Lady Blessington-what a trouvaille for the skilful handling of a Sainte Beuve ! Where are they now?

But reaction was not long coming. On March 13, 1873, Mr Gladstone resigned. Disraeli's political acumen was as sure as his historical knowledge. He once said to Sir William Harcourt, 'You and I are the only men in the House who know the history of our country.' Judged by the test of Stubbs or Freeman this claim may have been excessive, but there is another standard. Three men were once discussing the pre-eminence of historians; two of them were Mommsen and Lord Acton, who both agreed that the palm would be rightly awarded to Macaulay. According to this curious dictum, which places historical vision on the highest plane, Disraeli's claim to historical knowledge is made good, and he applied it to the full. Thus, in effect, he declined to take office in a Parliament in which his opponents were in a majority, and he refused to be responsible for a dissolution. Mr Gladstone resumed the government. But the hallali was sounded in a famous letter to Lord Grey de Wilton, the candidate for Bath, in which Disraeli accused the Ministers of having for five years harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class institution, adding that the country had made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering.'

This happened in October 1873; and in the early days of February 1874, there was, as Disraeli wrote to Monty Corry, 'a panic at Brooks'. When shortly afterwards he formed his Government, it was the strongest, he said, since Pitt. The doubtful point, the adherence of Lord Salisbury, was settled. The two men, so antagonistic in origin and temperament, met and agreed. Lord Salisbury was recognised to be the most potent of Disraeli's colleagues with the exception of Cairns. Lord Derby resumed his old place at the Foreign Office. Whether, as Mr Buckle affirms, the Cabinet was as strong and capable a one as has ever taken over the Vol. 234.-No. 464.

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government, may be disputed. That it was compactthe Cabinet did not exceed twelve-and that it contained besides Disraeli, two men of commanding character in Cairns and Salisbury, is indisputable, Gathorne Hardy as a parliamentarian and administrator was far above the average; but Lord Carnarvon, high-minded as he was, proved himself to be by his perverseness a source of weakness to his colleagues; and Lord Derby's intellectual gifts were crossed by indecision and instability that nearly proved fatal to Disraeli and to the Government. But these perils were hidden from all men when the Ministry was formed, and they were removed before the dangerous crisis occurred which, in hands less firm than those of Disraeli and Salisbury, would have precipitated the nation into a war with Russia.

The Government was formed easily and smoothly. Disraeli consulted no one but the Queen. To those who remember the painful birth of Mr Gladstone's Government in 1880-the cabals and secret conclaves, the clash of ambitions, the pleadings and menaces employed, and the compromises demanded and obtained-Mr Buckle's pages are of profound interest. They illustrate the power of leadership in a statesman whose firmness equals his perspicacity.

Disraeli's life had reached its zenith, but the moment of his triumph became that of his decline. He had achieved the glittering successes that Sidonia had prophesied, but his health, never strong, was beginning to fail. A visitor at Hughenden found him gazing into the fire and murmuring, 'Dreams, dreams, dreams.' They had been and were still the staple of his life. But his heightened consciousness was a symptom of decaying strength. He was old and sick. So worn a man had never held the post of Prime Minister in this country. Counting by years, he was ten years younger than Palmerston when, as First Minister, he could vault a gate at Broadlands to test his vigour, or Gladstone, when he felled trees to calm his troubled spirit. But no one who saw Lord Beaconsfield during the years that followed can forget the waxen face, the glassy eyes, the infirm gait of the Minister whose aspect recalled the physical decrepitude of the resuscitated Chatham. He was happy, however, in having once more a home in

London. He had recently acquired Number Two Whitehall Gardens, a house with a quiet and delightful outlook over the river, which has since become the Offices of the Committee of Imperial Defence and of the Cabinet. So that the room occupied by Disraeli during the greater part of his Premiership was the scene thirty years later of decisions that were destined to undo the work upon which Bismarck and he had laboured. Fortunately for the great, their fame is less transient than their achievements.

Disraeli had found in the two correspondents to whom most of the delightful letters in Mr Buckle's volumes are addressed, a companionship that balanced the harassing cares of office. Above all, he had conceived for the Queen, in the autumn of her life, a romantic sentiment not unlike that which had absorbed Lord Melbourne in her spring-time. The Fairy, as he calls her with Spenserian emphasis, was the corner-stone of his policy and the solace of his ministerial days. Disraeli's letters to the Queen form a literature of their own. They are not the formal letters of a Minister to a Sovereign. They are the letters of a man to a woman written daily, sometimes oftener, with deep respect as to an intellectual equal, often intimate but never familiar. As an example in what the French call tenue and in literary style they are beyond criticism. The Queen's replies are equally interesting. No stress should be laid upon their style. The Queen wrote in maturity much as she wrote as a school-girl. It is the penalty nearly every one pays who speaks and thinks in three or four languages. Style is indigenous; and the best writer of a language is he who is familiar with none but his own. Going behind the form of the Queen's letters to their substance, the reader discovers what Disraeli found -a character as strong as his own, and a logical clarity of purpose before which he bent.

In the beginning of the Balkan troubles the Queen seriously doubted the wisdom of her Minister's policy. She was unconvinced of the perfidy of the Russian Emperor, whom she liked, and she was moved by the sorrows of the Christian subjects of the Sultan. But, when that policy became the fixed policy of the nation, the Queen realised, long before it became clear to Lord

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