Dean Stanley was a little man, insignificant in stature, rather shabbily dressed, with a sharply cut nose and chin, a keen, penetrating look. His lustrous eyes would sometimes blaze up as if lighted by some hidden flame. He was not exactly eloquent, nor great in conversation. But when he was excited his enthusiasm was arresting and infectious. His great charm was universally acknowledged even by his bitterest theological opponents, and personally, everybody loved him, from the Queen downwards. He and his wife were among her trustiest friends. His attitude to the dogmas of the Churches was that of St. Paul to “Jewish fables.” His Christianity was the teaching of Christ. I have often thought that, unless the haziest of traditions be absolutely worthless, the small, eager, dark man that was St. Paul must have been very like Dean Stanley. Both zealots, both fierce fighters, both so lovable. One last word about Lord Beaconsfield. The abuse that has been showered upon him would fill volumes. No less has been written in his defence. He has been accused of being an adventurer, a pretentious fop, an impostor, a self-seeking charlatan, who by some uncanny means contrived to cajole the Tory party, and to become master of the landed gentry of England. Nothing could be more untrue. Had he been what his detractors described him, he never could have won the confidence of perhaps the most exclusive caste in the whole world. Benjamin Disraeli was an aristocrat to his fingers’ tips. He belonged by descent to the Sephardim, that proud race of Jews who, “in the time of Cicero, had been settled immemorially in Spain.”[43] Theirs was a nobility which dated back by tradition to Abraham, that Arab chieftain whose wanderings from the fringe of the desert to Damascus and Padan-Aram are recorded in the Book of Genesis. “That,” says a great writer who is no friend to the Jews, “is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful forms, noble heads, dignity in speech and deportment ... that out of such men prophets and psalmists should go forth, that I understood at the first glance.” Those words might stand for a portrait of Disraeli.