deliberate and cruel vigilance to discover what point will be tenderest, and what weapon will be sharpest. There is also the same absence of any strong convictions or fixed opinions; the same merging of principles in personalities; the same reduction of the great game of politics to a mere fencing match, where the object is not to pass a law, but to wound an adversary. Mr. Disraeli is not a statesman; he is not even a politician; he is simply a gladiator. No invective is too savage for his cold and artificial indignation; no sarcasm too bitter for his petty spite; no allusions too indecorous for his taste; no character pure enough to be sacred from his charges and insinuations. From the day when he endeavoured to obtain access to the same Parliament, first as a Radical, and then as a Tory; from the day when, under the signature of "Runnymede," he addressed a series of letters to the public men of England, of which it is difficult to say whether the adulation or the abuse is the most repellent; from the day when he repaid the scurrility of O'Connell with Billingsgate like his own, as vulgar, but far less effective; from the day when he fastened upon Peel, as the glutton fastens on the noble stag, and baited and worried him with the gusto of the torturers of old-to the day when he received the reward of his achievements in the leadership of his party, and a residence in Downing Street, and indulged first in the insolence of the triumphant official, and then in the impotent fury of the defeated and discarded minister,—Mr. Disraeli has been consistent and unique; he has never once deviated into right; he has never once, so far as we remember, been surprised into an unseemly fit of generosity or candour; he has never for a moment sacrificed personal gratification or a party triumph to a political object or a moral principle; during a public life of nearly twenty years, he has never belied his antecedents, or stained his reputation by one noble sentiment, or one disinterested deed. That such a man should have been the chosen chief of a great, and once a not ignoble party; that he should have been not only tolerated but cheered on in his gladiatorial displays, by so large a section of the gentry and nobility of England; that he should have been able to make himself Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons, over the heads of all his rivals, by the simple influence of a bitterer temper and a sharper tongue-these things constitute, we were about to say, the most disgraceful fact in the modern history of our country; but unhappily we can remember one in some respects analogous, but still more discreditable: the generation which witnessed the worship paid to Mr. Hudson need scarcely blush at the elevation decreed to Mr. Disraeli. The statue designed for the one is a fit pendant to the pedestal erected for the other. Mr. Disraeli's "Gems." 585 This is language which we seldom use, and it is painful to have to use it when speaking of contemporaries; but no one who reads the "Amenities of Political Literature," collected by Mr. Disraeli's biographer, will charge us with employing one epithet of unwarranted severity. We must, in justice to ourselves, give a specimen or two of the mode in which the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, at different periods of his career, thought it decent to speak of his opponent. To Mr. O'Connell's son he writes,"I wished to express the utter scorn in which I hold your father's character, and the disgust with which his conduct inspires me. I shall take every opportunity of holding up his name to public contempt; and I fervently pray that son, or some one of his blood, may attempt to avenge the unextinguishable hatred with which I shall pursue his existence."-The Globe had criticised him, and it is thus the future Leader of the House of Commons shows his fitness for the post." The editor of the Globe must have a more contracted mind, and a paltrier spirit, than even I imagined, if he can suppose for a moment, that an ignoble controversy with an obscure animal like himself, can gratify the passion for notoriety of one whose works, at least, have been translated into the languages of civilized Europe, and circulated by thousands in the New World. It is not then my passion for notoriety that has induced me to tweak the editor of the Globe by the nose, and inflict sundry kicks on the baser part of his base body-to make him eat dirt, and his own words, fouler than any filth; but because I wished to show to the world what a miserable poltroon, what a craven dullard, what a literary scarecrow, what a mere thing stuffed with straw, is this soi-disant director of public opinion, and official organ of Whig politics."-Lord John Russell is "born with a strong ambition, but a feeble intellect, ... a propensity to degrade everything to your own mean level, and to measure everything by your malignant standard; . . . he is a miniature Mokanna, exhaling upon the constitution of your country all the long hoarded venom, and those distempers that have for years accumulated in your petty heart, and tainted the current of your mortified existence."-Lord William Bentinck is told that his address to the electors is "admirably characteristic of a perplexed intellect and a profligate ambition; . . . an indication of your weak and perplexed mind, and your base and grovelling spirit."-Lord Palmerston is "the great apostle of aspiring understrappers, . . . blessed with a dexterity which seems a happy compound of the smartness of an attorney's clerk and the intrigues of a Greek of the lower empire." He is "your crimping Lordship," and is told that "your Lordship's career is as insignificant as your intellect."-We need not disfigure our pages with any more extracts. More recent expressions are fresh VOL. XXI. NO. XLII. 2 P in the memory of all. We can all remember how he described Sir Robert Peel's career as a course of petty larceny on a grand scale," and charged that eminent statesman with "a suppressio veri on a scale unprecedented in debate." We all know that he indulges in similar personalities to the present hour; and those who hear what we only read, describe his manner as even more insolent and indecorous than his words. Happily his star is on the wane, and his example may, therefore, be of less importance. He is beginning to weary the attention, as much as he has long offended the taste, of the House. Happily the ministry which thus revived all our worst traditions, and trampled on our amended habits, was of short duration, and has been succeeded by one in all respects its opposite. The destinies of the country are again committed to the hands of men of whose character it can be proud. The change is far greater than usually belongs to the retirement of one set of politicians and the advent of another. Its significance and its consequences stretch far beyond a mere transfer of the Seals of office from " Her Majesty's Ministers" to "Her Majesty's Opposition." It is not simply that better political opinions have come into power, that reforming doctrines are again in a majority, that liberal views have a greater chance of being carried out; it is that the councils of the nation are once more guided by statesmen who have earnest convictions, and noble aims, to whom power is not a possession to be grasped, but a trust to be fulfilled, and who are as incapable of forming mean projects as of pursuing them through miry ways. And those who believe with Mackintosh, that "there can be no scheme or measure as beneficial to the State as the mere existence of men who would not do a base act for any public advantage," who hold with us, that a nation can possess no richer patrimony, and no purer wealth, than the stainless honour of its public men,-will not deem the metamorphosis a small one. And though some prophets may imagine that our greatest days are over, that our British spirit has grown tame and feeble, that material interests are "too much with us," that a low, calculating, and commercial temper has become perilously prevalent, that wealth and luxury are sapping our energies, and lowering the tone of national sentiment, and that all these things are indications of our proximate "Decline and Fall;" yet, so long as the standard of political morality is growing more elevated, and the statesmen who conform to it more numerous, with each successive generation, we can point to a feature in our condition which never yet, since history began, belonged to a decaying empire. INDEX TO THE TWENTY-FIRST VOLUME OF THE NORTH BRITISH REVIEW. Achaean League, account of, 444. Allen, Mr., on the rise and progress of the Andersen, Hans, notice of his Danish Le- Angling in Scandinavian rivers, 233. Architecture. See Ruskin. Argyle family, virtual viceroyalty of, in Atmosphere in the planets, 3. Bear-hunting in Scandinavia, 238. Belhaven, Lord, his speech on the Union, Binary systems of stars, 29. Bonnechose's Quatre Conquêtes de l'Angle- Books for Children, 399-recollections of Brooksbank's translation of Dante, 452, Burton, J. H., notice of his History of Cary's translation of Dante, character of Celtic race, their love of repose, 48. Characteristics, British and Continental, 45 Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey noticed, 88. Comte, Auguste, and Positivism, 247-ge- statics, 290-general spirit and prospects Creasy, E. S., notice of his Rise and Pro- Dante, merits of various translations, 451- Achaean League, 442, 444. Disraeli, Benjamin, political morality of, 583. Dove, P. E., notice of his statement of Scot- Education, art of, 137-systems of educa- Marcus Aurelius, 104-estimate of his Fetichism, Comte's system of, 281. ciers, 201-resemblance between Nor- Freeman, E. A., on Gothic tracery, 198. Geologists, distinguished Scottish, 507. Gothic architecture, 179, seq. Hadrian, character of, 125-conduct to- |