he the devoted and respectful friend. When
once the personal relation was firmly established, every difficulty
disappeared. But to maintain that relation uninterruptedly in a smooth
and even course a particular care was necessary: the bearings had to be
most assiduously oiled. Nor was Disraeli in any doubt as to the nature
of the lubricant. "You have heard me called a flatterer," he said to
Matthew Arnold, "and it is true. Everyone likes flattery, and when you
come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel." He practiced what
he preached. His adulation was incessant, and he applied it in the very
thickest slabs. "There is no honor and no reward," he declared, "that
with him can ever equal the possession of your Majesty's kind thoughts.
All his own thoughts and feelings and duties and affections are now
concentrated in your Majesty, and he desires nothing more for his
remaining years than to serve your Majesty, or, if that service
ceases, to live still on its memory as a period of his existence most
interesting and fascinating." "In life," he told her, "one must have for
one's thoughts a sacred depository, and Lord Beaconsfield ever presumes
to seek that in his Sovereign Mistress." She was not only his own
solitary support; she was the one prop of the State. "If your Majesty
is ill," he wrote during a grave political crisis, "he is sure he will
himself break down. All, really, depends upon your Majesty." "He lives
only for Her," he asseverated, "and works only for Her, and without Her
all is lost." When her birthday came he produced an elaborate confection
of hyperbolic compliment. "To-day Lord Beaconsfield ought fitly,
perhaps, to congratulate a powerful Sovereign on her imperial sway, the
vastness of her Empire, and the success and strength of her fleets and
armies. But he cannot, his mind is in another mood. He can only think of
the strangeness of his destiny that it has come to pass that he should
be the servant of one so great, and whose infinite kindness, the
brightness of whose intelligence and the firmness of whose will, have
enabled him to undertake labours to which he otherwise would be quite
unequal, and supported him in all things by a condescending sympathy,
which in the hour of difficulty alike charms and inspires. Upon the
Sovereign of many lands and many hearts may an omnipotent Providence
shed every blessing that the wise can desire and the virtuous deserve!"
In those expert hands the trowel seemed to