When he died, amid national mourning, the late Lord Salisbury, after singling out his unquenchable zeal for the glory of Britain, lasting to a period when “the gratification of every possible desire negatived the presumption of any inferior motive,” adverted to his “patience, his gentleness, his unswerving and unselfish loyalty to his colleagues and fellow-labourers.” Indisputably his moral character was high. Without question he, like Gladstone, raised the tone of parliamentary life from that of the days when politics were merely a squabble for place and a toss-up as to “whether England should be ruled by Tory nobles or by Whig.” His tone may not always have chimed with certain forms or formulas of earnestness, but he acted up to his own high standard. “It was impossible,” said the late Lord Granville, “to deny that Lord Beaconsfield had played a great part in British History. No one could deny his rare and splendid gifts and his force of character.” Character will always appeal to England. “But,” pursued the orator, after noticing his tolerance and forbearance, “he undoubtedly possessed the power of appealing to the imagination, not only of his countrymen, but of foreigners,[188] and that power is not destroyed by death.” My book opened with Personality, Ideas, and Imagination. With Imagination, Ideas, and Personality it shall close. They can turn and change the semblances of material “facts,” for they abide behind the veil of time and of existence. FOOTNOTES [1] “... These are concessionary, not Conservative principles. This party treats institutions as we do our pheasants, they preserve only to destroy them.” [2] Swift, adverting to National Debt. [3] Cardinal Newman afterwards inveighed against the same union of faithlessness and Mammon in one of his finest sermons. Disraeli constantly dwelt on the dangers that liberty might suffer, if a democracy unreconciled to monarchy and its institutions became a class instead of an element, and was brought into collision with the “three per cents.” The despotisms of bare democracy and of aggravated plutocracy were equally distasteful to him, and he feared their union. _Cf._ many striking passages in _The Press_, 1853-59. [4] With this passage should be compared the striking remarks on p. 222 of _The Political Biography of Lord George Bentinck_. [5] “It was that noble ambition, the highest and the best, that must be born in the heart and organised in the brain, which will not let a man be content unless his intellectual power is recognised by his race, and desires that it should contribute to their welfare.” Thus he speaks of _Coningsby_, the castle of whose fathers is not to be one “of Indolence.” [6] Through Lord Durham, Lord J. Russell, and Lord Melbourne, whom he met early at Mrs. Norton’s.