Derision and persecution inspire a strong spirit with retaliation, and absolve him from scrupulous methods of compassing it. Two things the Jew pursues with an unappeasable passion--distinction and authority among believers, before whom his race has been compelled to cringe. An ancient people which subsists by subtlety and courage, has the heroic sense of high tradition, still looks forward to efface, not the indignity of days, but of centuries--which imparts to the Jew a lofty implacableness of aim, which never pauses in its purpose. How else came Mr. Disraeli by that form of assegai sentences, of which one thrust needed no repetition, and by that art which enabled him to climb on phrases to power? A critic, who had taken pains to inform himself, brought charges against D'Israeli the Elder to the effect that he had taken passages of mark from the books of Continental sceptics and had incorporated them as his own. At the same time he denounced the authors, so as to disincline the reader to look into their pages for the D'Israelian plagiaries. In the novels of D'Israeli the Younger I have come upon passages which I have met with elsewhere in another form. As the reader knows, Disraeli delivered in Parliament, as his own, a fine passage from Thiers. So that when Daniel O'Connell described Disraeli as "the heir-at-law of the impenitent thief who died on the cross," he was nearer the truth than he knew, for there was petty larceny in the Disraelian family. When Sir James Stansfeld entered Parliament he had that moral distrust of Disraeli, which Lord Salisbury, in his Cranborne days, published a _Review_ to warn his party against. Sir James (then Mr. Stansfeld) expressed a similar sentiment of distrust. Disraeli said to a friend in the lobby immediately after, "I will do for that educated mechanic" The vitriolic spite in the phrase was worthy of Vivian Grey. He kept his word, and caused Mr. Stansfeld's retirement from the Ministry. It was the nature of Disraeli to destroy any one who withstood him. At the same time he could be courteous and even kind to literary Chartists who, like Thomas Cooper and Ernest Jones, helped to frustrate the Whigs at the poll, which served the purpose of Tory ascendency, which was Disraeli's chance. In Easter, 1872, I was in Manchester when Disraeli had the greatest pantomime day of his life--when he played the Oriental Potentate in the Pomona Gardens. All the real and imaginary Tory societies that could be got together from surrounding counties were paraded in procession before him. To each he made audacious little speeches, which astonished them and, when made known, caused jubilancy in the city.