The highly-strung nature of artists is accountable for many misunderstandings, few more unintelligible than that which arose between the large-hearted Joachim and Brahms, the friend whom he admired and to whose fame he did so much to contribute. It all arose out of the performance or non-performance of a work of Brahms in 1873. It was a trifling matter which might probably have been set right with ease. It must have embittered the long years of life which remained to both, each conscious of the worth of the other. Brahms died in 1897; Joachim ten years later. The separation from his wife, whom he adored, and the loss of his friend, were cruel blows. There are other men besides Job who might well say, “I have lived too long!” CHAPTER XXXV 1874 LORD BEACONSFIELD Lord Beaconsfield was always singularly kind to me. One evening, soon after I went into the Foreign Office, I sat next to Mrs. Disraeli at a dinner at the house of Lord Combermere, the old Peninsular hero. All of a sudden she turned round to me and said, “Dizzy has got his eye upon you.” And so it proved to be, for many years after, when the kind old lady whom Queen Victoria created Viscountess Beaconsfield was dead, he, still Mr. Disraeli, gave me the first important appointment which fell to his gift as Prime Minister in 1874. He was then seventy years of age, but he looked older in spite of his carefully dyed and curled hair and a certain dandiness of dress, a relic of the D’Orsay days, which remained with him to the end. I used sometimes to fancy that when he walked in the streets leaning on the arm of his faithful “mastiff,” as he playfully called Lord Abergavenny, or Monty Corry, there was a slight purposeful exaggeration of the old-man stoop; certainly when he stood upright to make a speech, fired with excitement, there was no indication of any failing of strength, though his eyes latterly lost their brilliancy. Those eyes were the despair of Von Angeli when he painted his portrait for the Queen. “Das Auge ist tot,” he said. The _Vanity Fair_ picture of him in his long, pale brown coat, walking with Monty Corry, handsome, smart, carefully groomed, and obviously so proud of his charge, was admirable. Certainly no politician ever had a more devoted shadow than my dear old friend Monty was to him. The affection between them was most touching. Indeed Disraeli’s was one of those natures which compel affection by their own generous power of giving it. He loved his friends and they loved him.