A favourite subject of Disraeli's sarcasm in his campaign against Peel was that the latter habitually borrowed the ideas of others. "His (Peel's) life," he said, "has been a great appropriation clause. He is a burglar of others' intellect.... From the days of the Conqueror to the termination of the last reign there is no statesman who has committed political petty larceny on so great a scale." In a happy and inimitable metaphor he likened Sir Robert Peel's action in throwing over Protection to that of the Sultan's admiral who, during the campaign against Mehemet Ali, after preparing a vast armament which left the Dardanelles hallowed by the blessings of "all the muftis of the Empire," discovered when he got to sea that he had "an objection to war," steered at once into the enemy's port, and then explained that "the only reason he had for accepting the command was that he might terminate the contest by betraying his master." Other utterances of a similar nature abound, as, for instance, when he spoke of Lord Melbourne as "sauntering over the destinies of a nation, and lounging away the glories of an Empire," or when he likened those Tories who followed Sir Robert Peel to the Saxons converted by Charlemagne. "The old chronicler informs us they were converted in battalions and baptized in platoons." Warned by the fiasco of his first speech in the House of Commons, Disraeli for some while afterwards exercised a wise parsimony in the display of his wit. He discovered that "the House will not allow a man to be a wit and an orator unless they have the credit of finding it out." But when he had once established his position and gained the ear of the House, he gave a free rein to his prodigious powers of satire, which he used to the full in his attacks on Peel. In point of fact, vituperation and sarcasm were his chief weapons of offence. He spoke of Mr. Roebuck as a "meagre-minded rebel," and called Campbell, who was afterwards Lord Chancellor, "a shrewd, coarse, manœuvring Pict," a "base-born Scotchman," and a "booing, fawning, jobbing progeny of haggis and cockaleekie." When he ceased to be witty, sarcastic, or vituperative, he became turgid. Nothing could be more witty than when, in allusion to Peel's borrowing the ideas of others, he spoke of his fiscal project as "Popkins's Plan," but when, having once made this hit, which naturally elicited "peals of laughter from all parts of the House," he proceeded further, he at once lapsed into cheap rhetoric.