bad, and the thought is stale. Disraeli had
many mannerisms, innate and acquired. His English was frequently loose
and inexpressive; he was apt to trip in his grammar, to stumble over 'and
which,' and to be careless about the connection between his nominatives
and his verbs. Again, he could scarce ever refrain from the use of
gorgeous commonplaces of sentiment and diction. His taste was sometimes
ornately and barbarically conventional; he wrote as an orator, and his
phrases often read as if he had used them for the sake of their
associations rather than themselves. His works are a casket of such
stage jewels of expression as 'Palladian structure,' 'Tusculan repose,'
'Gothic pile,' 'pellucid brow,' 'mossy cell,' and 'dew-bespangled meads.'
He delighted in 'hyacinthine curls' and 'lustrous locks,' in 'smiling
parterres' and 'stately terraces.' He seldom sat down in print to
anything less than a 'banquet', he was capable of invoking 'the iris
pencil of Hope'; he could not think nor speak of the beauties of woman
except as 'charms.' Which seems to show that to be 'born in a library,'
and have Voltaire--that impeccable master of the phrase--for your chief
of early heroes and exemplars is not everything.

His Oratory.

It is admitted, I believe, that he had many of the qualities of a great
public speaker: that he had an admirable voice and an excellent method;
that his sequences were logical and natural, his arguments vigorous and
persuasive; that he was an artist in style, and in the course of a single
speech could be eloquent and vivacious, ornate and familiar, passionate
and cynical, deliberately rhetorical and magnificently fantastic in turn;
that he was a master of all oratorical modes--of irony and argument, of
stately declamation and brilliant and unexpected antithesis, of
caricature and statement and rejoinder alike; that he could explain,
denounce, retort, retract, advance, defy, dispute, with equal readiness
and equal skill; that he was unrivalled in attack and unsurpassed in
defence; and that in heated debate and on occasions when he felt himself
justified in putting forth all his powers and in striking in with the
full weight of his imperious and unique personality he was the most
dangerous antagonist of his time. And yet, in spite of his mysterious
and commanding influence over his followers--in spite, too, of the fact
that he died assuredly the most romantic and perhaps the most popular
figure of