nto prominence, and at
last to leadership, by his complete superiority to rebuffs. Through
the long years in which he had to make head against a majority in the
House of Commons, he never seemed disheartened by his repeated
defeats, never relaxed the vigilance with which he watched his
adversaries, never indulged himself (though he was physically
indolent and often in poor health) by staying away from Parliament,
even when business was slack; never missed an opportunity for exposing
a blunder of his adversaries, or commending the good service of one of
his own followers. The same curious tenacity was apparent in his
ideas. Before he was twenty-two years of age he had, under the
inspiration of Bolingbroke, excogitated a theory of the Constitution of
England, of the way England should be governed at home and her
policy directed abroad, from which he hardly swerved through all his
later life. Often as he was accused of inconsistency, he probably
believed himself to be, and in a sense he was, substantially faithful,
I will not say to the same doctrines, but to the same notions or
tendencies; and one could discover from the phrases he employed how
he fancied himself to be really following out these old notions, even
when his conduct seemed opposed to the traditions of his party.[6] The
weakness of intense minds is their tendency to narrowness, and this
weakness was in so far his that, while always ready for new
expedients, he was not accessible to new ideas. Indeed, the old ideas
were too much a part of himself, stamped with his own individuality, to
be forsaken or even varied. He did not love knowledge, nor enjoy
speculation for its own sake; he valued views as they pleased his
imagination or as they carried practical results with them; and having
framed his theory once for all and worked steadily upon its lines, he
was not the man to admit that it had been defective, and to set
himself in later life to repair it. His pride was involved in proving
it correct by applying it.

With this resolute concentration of purpose there went an undaunted
courage--a quality less rare among English statesmen, but eminently
laudable in him, because for great part of his career he had no family
or party connections to back him up, but was obliged to face the world
with nothing but his own self-confidence. So far from seeking to
conceal his Jewish origin, he displayed his pride in it, and refused
all support to the efforts which the Tory pa