Yet history will not leave him without a meed of admiration. When all possible explanations of his success have been given, what a wonderful career! An adventurer foreign in race, in ideas, in temper, without money or family connections, climbs, by patient and unaided efforts, to lead a great party, master a powerful aristocracy, sway a vast empire, and make himself one of the four or five greatest personal forces in the world. His head is not turned by his elevation. He never becomes a demagogue; he never stoops to beguile the multitude by appealing to sordid instincts. He retains through life a certain amplitude of view, a due sense of the dignity of his position, a due regard for the traditions of the ancient assembly which he leads, and when at last the destinies of England fall into his hands, he feels the grandeur of the charge, and seeks to secure what he believes to be her imperial place in the world. Whatever judgment history may ultimately pass upon him, she will find in the long annals of the English Parliament no more striking figure. ----- [1] No "authorised" life of Lord Beaconsfield, nor indeed any life commensurate with the part he played in English politics, has yet appeared. [2] Disraeli's family claimed to be of Spanish origin, but had come from Italy to England shortly before 1748. [3] There are few legal allusions in his novels, fewer in proportion than in Shakespeare's plays, but an ingenious travesty of the English use of legal fictions may be found in the _Voyage of Captain Popanilla_, a satire on the English constitution and government. Popanilla, who is to be tried for treason, is, to his astonishment, indicted for killing a camelopard. [4] That historical interest he did feel deeply. One might almost say of him that he was a Christian because he was a Jew, for Christianity was to him the proper development of the ancient religion of Israel. "The Jews," he observes in the _Life of Lord George Bentinck_, "represent the Semitic principle, all that is most spiritual in our nature.... It is deplorable that several millions of Jews still persist in believing only a part of their religion." [5] Though it has been maintained that in the Dark and Middle Ages a considerable number of Gentiles found their way into Jewish communities and became Judaised.