In the stubborn pursuit of his aims Disraeli even courted unpopularity. On every occasion when the object of the Jew bill was involved with other measures which he considered prejudical to its due interests, he risked misconstruction by withholding his vote. During the long spell of 1859-66, when a dispirited, and sometimes disloyal following often left him alone in his seat, he continued the pronouncements alike and the reticence which they disrelished. During the six years previous he dared to offend them equally by hammering the Government’s foreign policy, and insisting on his own convictions. Nobody, again, more regretted the precipitancy of Lord Derby in 1852, although his rash assumption of office afforded Disraeli his first hard-won opportunity of leadership. During three separate sets of discreditable intrigues to dethrone him, he kept place, counsel, and temper without wheedling concessions or recriminating revenges, though none could strike home harder when he chose. “... Ah, why should such enthusiasm ever die? Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervour.” The fact that both the mere egotist, and the man of intense personality, must, from the need of their respectively low and lofty concentrations, be self-centred, and infuse their temperaments into the objects of their energy, favours, it is true, the mistake to which I have referred. But the one is pettily fixed on self, the other intent on ideals. He leads a life of ideas which form his atmosphere, and which emanate from it. He mounts the chariot to drive it to a distant goal, while the other borrows or pilfers it for his own immediate convenience. Egoism--if I may coin a distinction--is one thing, egotism another. Goethe was an egoist--he is full of a radiating self; but such egoism is, if we reflect, the very opposite of the egotist, who is full of a shrivelled selfishness. Such were the later phases of Napoleon, who changed from a generous imparter into an absorbing monopolist. That was egotism. All genius, however, has been egoist, and ever will be; for genius is at once the ear, sensitive to the subtlest appeals of existence, and the voice which constrains others to enter the realm of its ideas. Its sensitiveness is part of its strength, and in this respect it shares the self-consciousness of the artist. It is in the real sense auto-suggestive; it implants ideas which its will generates into events. It is in some degree that-- “... which many people take for want of heart. They err.--’Tis merely what is called mobility, A thing of temperament, and not of art, Though seeming so from its supposed facility; And false though true; for surely they’re sincerest Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.” And its faults, as I shall show in my closing chapter, are associated with its very qualities.