ons from veracity which would have seemed grave in other
persons. He had given notice that he was not like other men, that his
words must not be taken in their natural sense, that he was to be
regarded as the skilful player of a great game, the consummate actor
in a great part. And, once more, he gained by the many years during
which he had opportunities of displaying his fortitude, patience,
constancy under defeat, unwavering self-confidence--gifts rarer than
mere intellectual power, gifts that deserve the influence they bestow.
Nothing so fascinates mankind as to see a man equal to every fortune,
unshaken by reverses, indifferent to personal abuse, maintaining a
long combat against apparently hopeless odds with the sharpest weapons
and a smiling face. His followers fancy he must have hidden resources
of wisdom as well as of courage. When some of his predictions come
true, and the turning tide of popular feeling begins to bear them
toward power, they believe that he has been all along right and the
rest of the world wrong. When victory at last settles on his crest,
even his enemies can hardly help applauding a reward which seems so
amply earned. It was by this quality, more perhaps than by anything
else, by this serene surface with fathomless depths below, that he
laid his spell upon the imagination of observers in Continental
Europe, and received at his death a sort of canonisation from a large
section of the English people.

What will posterity think of him, and by what will he be remembered?
The glamour has already passed away, and to few of those who on the
19th of April deck his statue with flowers is he more than a name.

Parliamentary fame is fleeting: the memory of parliamentary conflicts
soon grows dim and dull. Posterity fixes a man's place in history by
asking not how many tongues buzzed about him in his lifetime, but how
great a factor he was in the changes of the world, that is, how far
different things would have been twenty or fifty years after his death
if he had never lived. Tried by this standard, the results upon the
course of events of Disraeli's personal action are not numerous,
though some of them may be deemed momentous. He was an adroit
parliamentary tactician who held his followers together through a
difficult time. By helping to keep the Peelites from rejoining their
old party, he gave that party a colour different from the sober hues
which it had worn during the leadership of Peel. He became