By this time Baron Lionel had been in possession of a seat in the House of Commons some ten years, won though that seat had been only after a prolonged struggle. At the beginning of the century no Jew magistrate or sheriff existed. In 1837, Sir David Salomons became sheriff of London and Middlesex, but the true faith of a Christian test prevented him from serving. Eventually, to oblige the City, Lord Chancellor Campbell introduced a Bill removing this disability. Parliament, however, was still closed against the Jew. Ten years later Lionel Rothschild, with Lord John Russell, was elected M.P. for London. The Jewish Parliamentary Relief Bill, supported by Mr Disraeli as well as Mr Gladstone, passed the House of Commons, to be thrown out in the Lords. In 1850 another measure shared the same fate. The sixth decade of this century had come before the first Rothschild took his place on the green leather benches. Mr Disraeli's last novel, _Endymion_, as rich as any of its predecessors in personal portraits, contains in the character of Mr Neuchatel, the banker, the most graphic pen and ink sketch of the financier now mentioned. In the grounds of Gunnersbury, statesmen of both parties, diplomatists from every Court, foreigners of every grade of distinction met each other. Here Mr Disraeli chatted amicably with Lord Palmerston, the turbulence of whose foreign policy he was fresh from denouncing in the House of Commons. Hither Louis Napoleon, when an exile in London, drove in his friend Count Alfred D'Orsay's cabriolet. Here the veteran Lord Lyndhurst instructed in habits of English thought his aptest pupil, then a showy but still obscure politician soon to become the pillar of the Tory party. It was by Baron Lionel that the Rothschild hospitalities were begun on the scale on which they have since continued. First came the marriage of Baron Lionel's eldest daughter, Leonora, to her relative, Alphonse Rothschild. Persigny, then French Ambassador in London, made a speech which the Paris Academy recognized as classical in its perfection. Mr Disraeli, always pre-eminently happy on these occasions, delighted host, hostess, and guests by a coruscation of glittering antitheses, and flashing epigrams in affectionate honour of the bride and bridegroom. The ex-Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst himself, in whose honour the Baroness Mayer had given a fête a few days earlier at Mentmore, said a few words so happy in their arrangement, so dignified in their cadence that they were subsequently set to candidates for the Newcastle medal at Eton to translate into Attic prose.