He is no doubt adroit and ingenious in his management of men; but his cunning does not wear the smiling and elegant mask which a politician's should do. He does not possess the talent most necessary of all to a politician, of taking refuge in exquisitely-turned phrases which seem to reveal everything and reveal nothing. His voice is flexible and fine, his deliverance imposes, but his statements are frequently impudently cynical, and it is easy to discern that he holds men very cheap, and in no way hesitates to use, to abuse, and to deceive them. He is never really frank in his replies, though he affects candour; he often approaches brutality; he loses his temper easily; and the spectator sees by the nerves of his face and the movements of his limbs that he has not the self-control and _sang-froid_, which are natural gifts of the man of race and breeding. But despite these defects and these offences he has conquered both society and his colleagues, and one sees scholarly and refined men like Mr Arthur Balfour hopelessly and helplessly hypnotised by him. He has taken with him into Downing Street the manners and the methods with which he governed the town councillors of Birmingham; and these succeed equally well in his altered atmosphere. 'We are all horribly afraid of him,' one of his colleagues said the other day to a friend of mine; probably because he is the only man amongst them ill-bred and ill-tempered enough to be disagreeable and dangerous. In earlier days, in those of Derby, of Palmerston, of Melbourne, Westminster would not have tolerated him for a single session; in times when orators quoting Greek or Latin verse were sure to be understood by either House, when classical allusions were caught flying, when accuracy and consistency were esteemed necessary in debate, the speeches of the present Colonial Secretary would not have been thought tolerable. But the Great Britain of Lord Grey, of Canning, of Sydney Herbert, of the Rupert of Debate, of the first half of Gladstone's political life is dead and gone; and Disraeli has passed over its grave, of which he was the digger. Disraeli and his influence have dominated and penetrated English political and social atmospheres, in their highest strata, as a contagious fever enters and reigns in a district. It was a strange phenomenon, the Venetian Jew leading by the leash the entire English aristocracies. To trace the manifold reasons which enabled a man so alien and antipathetic to the British nation in blood, in manner, in appearance, in opinions, to dominate that nation so completely would require many folio volumes; for there has never been anything more singular, or more due to innumerable causes, all converging to one end.