less like, and though
there was much in Disraeli's ways of looking at things that must have
been peculiarly trying to the Whig mind. Lord Russell told me that he
once described him in Parliament by quoting the lines of Dryden:--

'He was not one on picking work to dwell.
He fagotted his notions as they fell;
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.'

[Sidenote: HIS EARLY CHIEFS]

'Of his early chiefs, he used to speak with most reverence of Lord Grey.
Lord Melbourne, he said, greatly injured his Government by the manner in
which he treated deputations. He never could resist the temptation of
bantering and snubbing them. Two men who flourished in his youth
surpassed, Lord Russell thought, in eloquence any of the later
generation. They were Canning and Plunket, and as an orator the greater
of these was Plunket. Among the statesmen of a former generation, he had
an especial admiration for Walpole, and was accustomed to maintain that
he was a much greater statesman than Pitt. His judgment, indeed, of Pitt
always seemed to me much warped by that adoration of Fox which in the
early years of the century was almost an article of religion in Whig
circles. Lord Russell had also the true Whig reverence for William III.,
and, I am afraid, he was by no means satisfied with some pages I wrote
about that sovereign.

'Speaking of Lord Palmerston, I once said to him that I was struck with
the small net result in legislation which he accomplished considering
the many years he was in power. "But during all these years," Lord
Russell replied, "he kept the honour of England very high; and I think
that a great thing."

'The Imperialist sentiment was one of the deepest in his nature, and few
things exasperated him more than the school which was advocating the
surrender of India and the Colonies. "When I was young," he once said to
me, "it was thought the work of a wise statesman that he had turned a
small kingdom into a great empire. In my old age it seems to be thought
the object of a statesman to turn a great empire into a small kingdom."
He thought we had made a grave mistake, when conceding self-government
to the Colonies, in not reserving the waste lands and free trade with
the Mother Country; and he considered that the right of veto on
legislation, which had been reserved, ought to have been always
exercised (as he said it was under Lord Grey) when duties were imposed
on English goods. In Irish politics he great