Even his smile was half inward. The irony of life, and of
his own position, was a subject of inexhaustible amusement to him.
There was nothing in his nature low, sordid, or petty. It was not
money, nor rank, but power which he coveted, and at which he aimed.
Irreproachable in domestic life, faithful in friendship, a placable
enemy, undaunted by failure, accepting final defeat with philosophic
calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and
made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as
he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything
stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English
politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not
his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In
any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the principal
figure. In the Congress of Berlin, where he did nothing, or next to
nothing, he attracted the gaze of every one, not for anything he
said there, but because he was there at all. If he had left an
autobiography, it would be priceless, not for its facts, but for its
opinions. That Froude thoroughly understood him it would be rash to
say. But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that
an ordinary writer would have missed altogether. For instance, the
full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli
appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with
Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one
else exactly as Froude gave it. Nothing like it had ever happened
before. It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever
happen again. Froude found the origin of the Established Church in
the statutes of Henry VIII. Gladstone found it, or seemed to find
it, in the poems of Homer. In Disraeli's eyes its pedigree was
Semitic, and it ministered to the "craving credulity" of a sceptical
age, undisturbed by the provincial arrogance that flashed or flared
in an essay or review.

"In the year 1864," says Froude, "Disraeli happened to be on a visit
at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was
to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the
chair. The clerical mind had been doubly exercised, by the
appearance of Colenso on the 'Pentateuch' and Darwin on the 'Origin
of Species.' Disraeli, to the surprise of every one, presented
himself in the theatre. He had long abandoned the sati