rs of it. Lord Derby, the son of the late Prime Minister
and Disraeli's Foreign Secretary, viewed these developments with grave
mistrust. "Is there not," he ventured to write to his Chief, "just a
risk of encouraging her in too large ideas of her personal power, and
too great indifference to what the public expects? I only ask; it is for
you to judge."

As for Victoria, she accepted everything--compliments, flatteries,
Elizabethan prerogatives--without a single qualm. After the long gloom
of her bereavement, after the chill of the Gladstonian discipline, she
expanded to the rays of Disraeli's devotion like a flower in the sun.
The change in her situation was indeed miraculous. No longer was she
obliged to puzzle for hours over the complicated details of business,
for now she had only to ask Mr. Disraeli for an explanation, and he
would give it her in the most concise, in the most amusing, way. No
longer was she worried by alarming novelties; no longer was she put out
at finding herself treated, by a reverential gentleman in high collars,
as if she were some embodied precedent, with a recondite knowledge of
Greek. And her deliverer was surely the most fascinating of men. The
strain of charlatanism, which had unconsciously captivated her in
Napoleon III, exercised the same enchanting effect in the case of
Disraeli. Like a dram-drinker, whose ordinary life is passed in dull
sobriety, her unsophisticated intelligence gulped down his rococo
allurements with peculiar zest. She became intoxicated, entranced.
Believing all that he told her of herself, she completely regained the
self-confidence which had been slipping away from her throughout
the dark period that followed Albert's death. She swelled with a new
elation, while he, conjuring up before her wonderful Oriental visions,
dazzled her eyes with an imperial grandeur of which she had only dimly
dreamed. Under the compelling influence, her very demeanour altered.
Her short, stout figure, with its folds of black velvet, its muslin
streamers, its heavy pearls at the heavy neck, assumed an almost
menacing air. In her countenance, from which the charm of youth had long
since vanished, and which had not yet been softened by age, the traces
of grief, of disappointment, and of displeasure were still visible, but
they were overlaid by looks of arrogance and sharp lines of peremptory
hauteur. Only, when Mr. Disraeli appeared, the expression changed in an
instant, and the forbidding