Disraeli’s wit is at root arabesque. Its filagree flourishes, like the ornaments of the Alhambra, are supported by solid if slender pillars. It is fanciful grace sustained by a poised strength; but it is also tempered by the cheery, if sententious, cynicism of the eighteenth century, in which he had steeped himself from childhood. Its source was racial; but its form and colour were much influenced by Pope, Swift, and Voltaire. He was “a master of sentences.” He delighted to condense thought, as it were, in civilised proverbs, and at the same time to let his terse fancy[169] embellish it with subtle and airy flourishes. His paradoxes are almost always thought in a nutshell, and never obscure nonsense in a clever frame. Of his directer wit, a good instance is to be found in his repartee to the crowd at his early Marylebone election: “On what do you stand?” “_My head._” Or his remark on the member who solemnly assured the House that he “took” his “stand” on “progress.” “It occurred to me that progress was a somewhat slippery thing to take one’s stand on.” When the late Mr. Beresford Hope’s rather turgid remark on the “golden image set up on the sands of Arabia” provoked Disraeli’s famous phrase, its accompaniment was equally good. He said that there was “a certain prudery” about the honourable member’s eloquence which never failed to fascinate.[170] The great Catholic lady who received her guests “with extreme unction” reminds one of Horace Walpole. Wit, of whatever class, is, roughly speaking, twofold in degree--lightning wit and wit lambent--the wit that strikes sharply, and the pleasantry that shines around its object. In the first Disraeli excelled. Like his own Monsignor, he “sparkles with anecdote and blazes with repartee.” His pages bristle with good things; it is hard to choose. Every one remembers his political retorts and his literary aphorisms. “One whom I will not say that I respect, but rather that I regard.” Another, “Who has learned much, but has still to learn that petulance is not sarcasm, nor insolence invective.” The “conjuror who advances to the edge of the platform, and for hours draws yards of red tape from his mouth.” One quotation against Peel--“Always ready with his Virgil”--that of the Horatian “Vectabor tunc humeris;” and “Is England to be governed by Popkins’ plan?” “Batavian Grace,” “Superior Person,” and the like. Then there are the drunken recruits “full of spirit;” the hansom, the “gondola of London;” the critics, “the men who have failed;”[171] Tadpole’s, “Tory men and Whig measures;” and Rigby’s, “little words in great capitals”--these are household words. “Our young Queen, and our old institutions.” There are Diplomatists, “the Hebrews of politics;” St. James’s Square, “the Faubourg St. Germain of London;” the “bad politician” of the ’thirties, who “like a bad shilling has worn off his edge by his very restlessness,” and the enlightened Whig minister “almost eructating with the plenary