Much, too, has been prattled about his “audacity,” and I notice that the hackneyed quotation about “L’audace” is usually in these diatribes ascribed to Danton, and not to its author, Beaumarchais. Many of these “audacities” are now recognised as wisdom; but it has been after-wisdom that has recognised it; though Disraeli was usually Prometheus. “There are times,” he said in one of his early novels, “when I am influenced by a species of what I may term happy audacity, for it is a mixture of recklessness and self-confidence, which has a very felicitous effect upon the animal spirits. At these moments I never calculate consequences, yet everything seems to go right. I feel in good fortune; the ludicrous side of everything occurs to me; I think of nothing but grotesque images. I astonish people by bursting into laughter apparently without a cause....” Disraeli was naturally sensitive, but he studied self-repression. No one was more cut to the quick by contumely or impertinence; no one was more determined to hide the wound. “If,” once observed Jowett, “Dizzy were on the brink of the bottomless pit, and each moment about to fall into it, his look would never betray the fact; such is his pluck and power of countenance.” As he bore himself towards provocation, he bore himself towards pain. The last great speech he ever made was delivered with youthful jauntiness, yet he was forced to take a drug in order to deliver it. “One must meet death boldly,” he exclaimed to an intimate friend, after he had read the denial of the doctors’ assurance in their faces. Disraeli’s intellectual shortcomings are those, it seems to me, belonging to an intense, as opposed to a diffused imagination. His mind shed both heat and light, but both the light and the heat were over-concentrated. The same applies, perhaps, to his will, and to his character also. Everything in him was focussed. His ideas possessed him, and he chafed, like a sculptor at work, to embody them. Outside the forms of those ideas he could not penetrate. In relation to them, he judged all junctures and all endeavours. It is this averseness to the abstract that pervades his every outlook. He could not conceive of ideas as unmaterialised or disembodied. They had been the companions of his boyish solitude. “... The clustering of their beauty seemed an evidence of poetic power: the management of these bright guests was an art of which I was ignorant. I received them all, and found myself often writing only that they might be accommodated.” As a child, his ruling mood was that of reverie. He had steeped himself in his father’s library, and his extraordinary imagination played upon the poets, the philosophers, and, above all, the historians. Dim dreams from the vast procession of the centuries took shape and became flesh. He beheld the great men and movements marching before him. Incarnate presences peopled his loneliness, and called to him with their voices--