Much has been talked of his alien “aloofness.” As for alien, Mazarin was in this sense an “alien,” not to speak of the less worthy examples, Alberoni and Ripperda. In the eighteenth century a Scotch premier was in England an “alien.” Augustus was partly, Napoleon wholly, an “alien.” And what but “aliens” were Manin, Gambetta, Lasker, Midhat, and Emin? Nobody understood his countrymen more shrewdly at once and sympathetically than Disraeli. His was no sham patriotism, and he loved John Bull fondly, even when he poked fun at him. Nor had any pondered more deeply the lessons which history imparts. There are, however, two grains of truth in this reproach. He did regard the world and its history as a fleeting show. He believed in recurring cycles. What is now old was once new; what is new will one day be old. So long as individuals worked their best, what did it matter? One civilisation succeeds another, and the last state of a mighty nation is often worse than the first. “The whirligig of Time brings about his revenges.” In this sense--the historical and philosophical sense--he might be called indifferentist. And again, he understood England, but it took long for his countrymen to understand _him_. When they came to do so, he met with that generosity which immense bravery and perseverance always eventually receive; but, meanwhile, he had struggled against a jealous malice which is, perhaps, peculiar to politics. He had “educated” his followers, but suspicion and misunderstanding hampered his every step. During two spans of some six years each (without counting his early period) he had to play the losing game with an unruffled brow, an encouraging smile, and an unwearied resource, which included the transformation of a party and foundation of a political magazine. He had to hearten the despairing, the recalcitrant, the slothful, and the sullen. He had to deplore the stupidity of missed opportunities;[185] he had to humour the engrossers of office; and, even, in the intervals of power, to bend his neck to the grindstone of finance. “I am not,” he once sarcastically rejoined, alluding to Sir Charles Wood opposite, “a born Chancellor of the Exchequer.” His hour struck. At sixty-four he began to govern England on lines planned and with projects pondered full thirty years earlier; and even then he had to confront anonymous endeavours to sap his leadership from quarters which should have disarmed suspicion. His own mind was impartial in the extreme. The same “aloofness” which he is alleged to have displayed to British affairs, he certainly displayed in his books with regard to Eastern emirs, who talk with the aspirations of the West. “Alroy” himself is very European, and never more so than when he disdains the isolating fanaticism of “Jabaster.”