ss those who
condemn and those who defend or excuse some momentous parts of his
conduct, such as, for instance, his policy in the East and in
Afghanistan from 1876 to 1879, will differ in their judgment of his
wisdom and foresight. If this be a difficulty, it is an unavoidable
one, and may never quite disappear. There were in the days of Augustus
some who blamed that sagacious ruler for seeking to check the
expansion of the Roman Empire. There were in the days of King Henry
the Second some who censured and others who praised him for issuing
the Constitutions of Clarendon. Both questions still remain open to
argument; and the conclusion any one forms must affect in some measure
his judgment of each monarch's statesmanship. So differences of
opinion about particular parts of Disraeli's long career need not
prevent us from dispassionately inquiring what were the causes that
enabled him to attain so striking a success, and what is the place
which posterity is likely to assign to him among the rulers of
England.

First, a few words about the salient events of his life, not by way of
writing a biography, but to explain what follows.

He was born in London, in 1804. His father, Isaac Disraeli, was a
literary man of cultivated taste and independent means, who wrote a
good many books, the best known of which is his _Curiosities of
Literature_, a rambling work, full of entertaining matter. He belonged
to that division of the Jewish race which is called the Sephardim, and
traces itself to Spain and Portugal;[2] but he had ceased to frequent
the synagogue--had, in fact, broken with his co-religionists. Isaac
had access to good society, so that the boy saw eminent and polished
men from his early years, and, before he had reached manhood, began
to make his way in drawing-rooms where he met the wittiest and
best-known people of the day. He was articled to a firm of attorneys
in London in 1821, but after two or three years quitted a sphere for
which his peculiar gifts were ill suited.[3] Samuel Rogers, the poet,
took a fancy to him, and had him baptized at the age of thirteen. As
he grew up, he was often to be seen with Count d'Orsay and Lady
Blessington, well-known figures who fluttered on the confines of
fashion and Bohemia. It is worth remarking that he never went either
to a public school or to a university. In England it has become the
fashion to assume that nearly all the persons who have shone in public
life have been educate