e enemies thy footstool.
The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Zion: be
thou ruler in the midst of thine enemies.
In the day of thy power shall the people offer thee freewill
offerings with a holy worship: the dew of thy birth is of
the womb of the morning._'"

The Earl remains impassive.

"Half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew."

Whom does he worship?

"Sensible men never tell."

IV

Yet in that facial mask I seem to read all the tale of the long years
of desperate waiting, only half sweetened by premature triumphs of pen
and person; all the rancorous energies of political strife.

And as I gaze, a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and
glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no
sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls
across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic vulgarity coarsens the
features, there is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner of the
lips.

I think of his books, of his grandiose style, gorgeous as his early
waistcoats and gold chains, the prose often made up of bad blank
verse, leavings from his long coxcombical strain to be a poet; of his
false-sublime and his false-romantic, of his rococo personages,
monotonously magnificent; of his pseudo-Jewish stories, and his
braggart assertions of blood, played off against the insulting pride
of the proudest aristocracy in the world, and combined with a politic
perseverance to be more English than the English; of his naive delight
in fine clothes and fine dishes and fine company; of his nice conduct
of a morning and evening cane; of his morbid self-consciousness of his
gifts and his genius; of his unscrupulous chase of personal success
and of Fame--that shadow which great souls cast, and little souls
pursue as substance; of his scrupulous personal rejection of
Love--Love, the one touch of true romance in his novels--and his
pecuniary marriage for his career's sake, after the manner of his
tribe; of his romanesque conception of the British aristocracy, which
he yet dominates, because he is not really rooted in the social
conceptions which give it its prestige, and so is able to manoeuvre
it artistically from without, intellect detached from emotion: to play
English politics like a game of chess, moving proud peers like pawns,
with especial skill in handling his Queen; his very imperturbability
under attack, only the mediaeva