“It is an expressive language, but not difficult to master. Its range is limited. It consists, so far as I can observe, of four words, “nice,” “jolly,” “charming,” and “bore;” and some grammarians add “fond.” But none knew better than Disraeli that wit unrelieved is metallic. He had a very real perception of the ludicrous, and it was usually of a cast bordering on irony. In boyhood, Disraeli had been a great admirer of Montaigne, one of those authors, as he acknowledged, who “give a spring to the mind;” but I cannot discern any influence of Montaigne’s twinkling stillness on Disraeli’s humour. The humour of Molière and of Sheridan, like that of Fielding, of Hogarth, and of Dickens, is direct and didactic, pointing to the follies and foibles of mankind. That, on the other hand, of Sterne, often of Thackeray, always of Heine, is indirect, inclined to be sentimental, and insinuating with all the machinery of playful surprise, the inconsistencies that enlist feeling or awaken thought. Swift’s grim and creative humour, also, that “knocks off the tallest of heads” with a knotted bludgeon, wielded, however, by an imaginative fierceness, is of the same order; and Swift had been early studied, was constantly quoted, and often imitated by Disraeli. The former is the broadsword of Cœur de Lion; the latter, the scimitar of Saladin. It is of this latter species that Disraeli at his best must be reckoned. It stamps the whole of _Popanilla_, and much of _Ixion_, and _The Infernal Marriage_, and it interleaves both his wit, his argument, and his reflection throughout his novels, and, conspicuously in his triumph, _Coningsby_. Take “Lord Monmouth’s” indignant lesson to the hero: “You go with your family, sir, like a gentleman. _You are not to consider your opinions like a philosopher or a political adventurer_;” or the motive for his bequest of his bust to “Rigby,” “that he might perhaps wish to present it to another friend;” or the same amiable nobleman’s reason for esteeming besides appreciating “Sidonia”--he was so rich that he could not be bought. “A person or a thing that you perhaps could not buy, became,” in his eyes, “invested with a kind of halo amounting almost to sanctity.” “Lord Monmouth,” indeed, and “Rigby” are Disraeli’s masterpieces in this vein; and “Mrs. Guy Flouncey,” who, like “Becky,” “was always sure of an ally the moment the gentlemen entered the drawing-room,” follows at no very remote distance. Take “Waldershare’s” account of England’s ascendency:-- “I must say it was a grand idea of our Kings making themselves sovereigns of the sea. _The greater portion of this planet is water, so we at once became a first-rate power._” Or the Homeric simplicity of the “Ansary” tribe, who believe London to be surrounded by sea, and inquire if the English dwell in ships, and are thus corrected by their would-be interpreter “Keferinis”--