It was during one of Sir William Harcourt’s visits to Hughenden that Disraeli turned to him after dinner and said, “Harcourt, I have had two young gentlemen from Oxford staying with me lately, and it seems from what I have learned from them that our judgments in all literary matters are sadly old-fashioned. These young gentlemen assured me that, according to the accepted canons of the present day, the late Lord Byron is to be admired, not so much for his qualities as a poet, as for the beauty of his moral character.” Lord Beaconsfield’s appearance, as expressed in his dress, even at that later date when I first came in contact with him, still retained something of the florid taste that had characterised him as a youth. The bright colours he chose to affect stood in striking contrast with the impassive pallor of a countenance that seemed, as it gazed out upon the world, like some insoluble riddle of the East. The racial characteristics of his face were sufficiently marked, but the sense of death-like stillness that pervaded it gave it something of historic remoteness and antique calm. He looked out upon the present as though from the recesses of a buried past, and of all the representatives of his nation whom I have known, he appeared to me the only one who possessed in any pre-eminent degree the quality of self-possession in manner and bearing. These external attributes served as the index of that extraordinary power of intellectual detachment which enabled him to sway the passions of others and to control his own. Such unquestioned authority as he ultimately acquired over the Tory party could, perhaps, only have been achieved by one who used their prejudices without sharing them, and who could appeal to their deeply rooted convictions rather as an artist than as a partisan. As a speaker, he affected more of florid grace than was quite congenial to the taste of the time or the sympathies of his hearers, and his choice of language, whether in his novels or in his speeches, was sometimes insecurely poised between a leaning towards ornament that was sometimes tawdry, and a genuine and convincing eloquence. Here again the racial characteristics were apt to assert themselves, and such a phrase as he employed at the conclusion of the Abyssinian War--that we had set the standard of St. George upon the mountains of Rasselas--may be taken as an instance of an essay in the sublime that verges nearly upon the ridiculous. I heard him for the first time when he introduced his great Reform Bill in 1867, and his gestures also struck me then as often bordering upon the grotesque. I can recall his attitude now as he drew towards the close of his speech with his arms folded and his head sunk upon his breast, rolling out in a voice, that I confess had for me neither intrinsic beauty of tone nor perfect accent of sincerity, the carefully forged phrases which formed the close of his peroration.