The aristocracy to which he belonged sprang from another continent, another world from ours; but alien though it might be, it brought him into close sympathy with the bluest blood in England, and that, I take it, is why he was able to gain an intimate personal influence in the inner sanctuaries of politics and of society which had never been achieved by men springing from the middle class, not even by Sir Robert Peel. “When I was a young and struggling man,” he is reported to have said shortly before his death, “they taunted me with being an adventurer. Now that I have succeeded they still bring the same reproach against me. Me! whose ancestors may have had personal relations with the Queen of Sheba!” It was a jest expressing a conviction, for, like the poet Heine—also a Jew by birth, a Christian by confession, in whom the Philhellenic attraction of years paled before the romance of the Old Testament—as he grew older he became more and more imbued with a sacred sense of ancestry. No mere vulgar adventurer could have welded into shape the Young England party—his first great political achievement. Lord John Manners, Baillie Cochrane (Lord Lamington), George Smythe, afterwards Lord Strangford, were men of family, high culture, and distinction. Not for one moment would they have admitted to their intimacy, and fallen under the sway of, a man whom they did not deem their equal. But Benjamin Disraeli, the descendant of the Princes of the Desert, possessed a magnetic spark of the mysterious sacred fire which made him as welcome to those great Dames who ruled Almack’s with a rod of iron as to Kensington Gore, where D’Orsay was King and Lady Blessington Queen of a society half aristocratic, half Bohemian, wholly delightful. This it was which finally enabled him to win over and mould to his purpose the haughty magnates of the Carlton Club.