resolution a
series of losing battles. This he did with admirable tenacity of
purpose. Once or twice in every session he used to rally his forces
for a general engagement, and though always defeated, he never
suffered himself to be dispirited by defeat. During the rest of the
time he was keenly watchful, exposing all the mistakes in domestic
affairs of the successive Liberal Governments, and when complications
arose in foreign politics, always professing, and generally
manifesting, a patriotic desire not to embarrass the Executive, lest
national interests should suffer. Through all these years he had to
struggle, not only with a hostile majority in office, but also with
disaffection among his own followers. Many of the landed aristocracy
could not bring themselves to acquiesce in the leadership of a new
man, of foreign origin, whose career had been erratic, and whose ideas
they found it hard to assimilate. Ascribing their long exclusion from
power to his presence, they more than once conspired to dethrone him.
In 1861 these plots were thickest, and Disraeli was for a time left
almost alone. But as it happened, there never arose in the House of
Commons any one on the Conservative side possessing gifts of speech
and of strategy comparable to those which in him had been matured and
polished by long experience, while he had the address to acquire an
ascendency over the mind of Lord Derby, still the titular head of the
party, who, being a man of straightforward character, high social
position, and brilliant oratorical talent, was therewithal somewhat
lazy and superficial, and therefore disposed to lean on his lieutenant
in the Lower House, and to borrow from him those astute schemes of
policy which Disraeli was fertile in devising. Thus, through Lord
Derby's support, and by his own imperturbable confidence, he
frustrated all the plots of the malcontent Tories. New men came up
who had not witnessed his earlier escapades, but knew him only as the
bold and skilful leader of their party in the House of Commons. He
made himself personally agreeable to them, encouraged them in their
first efforts, diffused his ideas among them, stimulated the local
organisation of the party, and held out hopes of great things to be
done when fortune should at last revisit the Tory banner.

While Lord Palmerston lived, these exertions seemed to bear little
fruit. That minister had, in his later years, settled down into a sort
of practical Toryism