ers were created to feed canals,--these and other tendencies favoured
by party government are hit off to the life. 'The man they called Dizzy'
can despise a miserable creature having the honour to be as heartily as
Carlyle himself, and, if his theories are serious, sometimes took our
blessed Constitution to be a mere shelter for such vermin as the Tapers
and Tadpoles. Two centuries of a parliamentary monarchy and a
parliamentary Church, says Coningsby, have made government detested, and
religion disbelieved. 'Political compromises,' says the omniscient
Sidonia, 'are not to be tolerated except at periods of rude transition.
An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariat of what is called
representative government. Your House of Commons, that has absorbed all
other powers in the State, will in all probability fall more rapidly
than it rose.' In short, the press will take its place. This is one of
those impromptu theories of history which are not to be taken too
literally. Indeed, the satirical background is intended to throw into
clearer relief a band of men of genius to whom has been granted some
insight into the great political mystery. Who, then, are the true
antithesis to the Tapers and Tadpoles? Should we compare them with a
Cromwell, who has a creed as well as a political platform; and contrast
'our young Queen and our old institutions' with some new version of the
old war cry, 'The sword of the Lord and of Gideon'? Or may we at least
have a glimpse of a Chatham, wakening the national spirit to sweep aside
the Newcastles and Bubb Dodingtons of the present day? Or, if Cromwells
and Chathams be too old-fashioned, and translate the Semitic principle
into a narrow English Protestantism, may we not have some genuine
revolutionary fanatic, a Cimourdain or a Gauvain, to burn up all this
dry chaff of mouldy politics with the fire of a genuine human passion?
Such a contrast, however effective, would have been a little awkward in
the year 1844. Young England had an ideal standard of its own, and
Disraeli must be the high priest of its peculiar hero-worship. Whether,
in this case, political trammels injured his artistic sense, or whether
his peculiar artistic tendencies injured his political career, is a
question rather for the historian than the critic.

Certain it is, at any rate, that the _cenacle_ of politicians, whose
interests are to be thrown in relief against this mass of grovelling
corruption, forms but a feebl