When Disraeli was out of office for the last term, he was walking with a leading member of the Government that had replaced his own. The statesman asked him how he thought the new Administration was getting on. “Pretty well,” was his answer, “but I like the old-fashioned methods. The first year you do nothing; the second year you talk of doing something; the third year you do something--and succeed; the fourth you do something--and fail; the fifth year you spend in discussing whether it was a failure or not; the sixth, you go to the country, _who pronounce that it was_.” Most of these are to some degree fanciful _persiflage_. Not so the following--a passage alluded to in a note already, and compared with another one from Heine. He is describing the Vintage Feast of Tabernacles, and the passage is the more remarkable because Disraeli’s father instances this very festival as one of the obsolete and fanatical absurdities that unfit the Old Testament religion for its proper fulfilment by the New:-- “Picture to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the stolid quarter of some bleak Northern town, where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes; yet he must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine.... He rises in the morning, goes early to some Whitechapel market, purchases some willow boughs for which he has previously given a commission, and which are brought probably from one of the neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his miserable tenement, builds his bower, decks it even profusely with the finest flowers and fruit he can procure, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the service of his synagogue, he sups late with his wife and children, as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee beneath its sweet and starry sky.... Perhaps as he is offering up the peculiar thanksgiving, ... and his wife and children are joining in a pious ‘Hosanna’--that is, ‘Save us’--_a party of Anglo-Saxons, very respectable men, ten-pounders, a little elevated, it may be, though certainly not in honour of the vintage, pass the house, and words like these are heard: ‘I say, Buggins, what’s that row?’ ‘Oh, it’s those cursed Jews! We’ve a lot of them. It’s one of their horrible feasts. The Lord Mayor ought to interfere. However, things are not so bad as they used to be. They used always to crucify little boys at their hullabaloos, but now they only eat sausages made of stinking pork.’ ‘To be sure,’ replies his companion, ‘we all make progress.’_” And there are many pendants to this kind of pathetic humour in the sad vagaries, degraded ignorance, sordid joys and squalid sorrows of the operatives of “Wodgate” so sympathetically presented in _Sybil_:--