I have no especial veneration for Lord Beaconsfield as a politician, but I admire him for his unconventionality. How many young men possess the pluck to appear at a dinner party in green velvet trousers, a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes with silver buckles, lace at their wrists, and their hair in ringlets? On another occasion, Disraeli turned up at a diocesan gathering at Oxford clad in a black velveteen shooting jacket, with a wideawake hat. A Respectable booby, writing the other day to a Liberal newspaper, referred to these eccentricities as though they were vices in a man, instead of recognising that such flaunting of a dull, drab Respectability, betokened courage and individuality. Immediately you dress in accordance with your own taste, instead of in the mufti of convention, you are dubbed a mountebank and a posturer. Of course, after these aberrations of deportment and form, there is not a good word to be said for Dizzy, only vehement abuse and denunciation. Yet the same Radical Respectable knew perfectly well, when he sat down to write that diatribe, that many of his class affect peculiarities of dress. CHAPTER X. RESPECTABLE CIVILISATION AND AFTER. "I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold." WALT WHITMAN. It is the boast of the ordinary patriotic Briton that he lives in a highly civilised country. During his tutelage, he learns that climate, or insularity of position on the face of the globe, or the system of monarchy, or the Bible, has, or have, combined or separately, made England the foremost nation on earth. In later life he is sometimes prone to exclaim against our "advanced civilisation," and even to go to the extreme of asserting that we could well dispense with much of it. The latter-day Anglo-Saxon, who thinks without thought, has for himself a very clear and satisfying idea of civilisation. Emerson, on the other hand, remarks that "nobody has attempted a definition of civilisation," and that "we usually suggest it by negations;" and he adduces instances of people lacking an alphabet, iron, and abstract thought. Thus, when we ask for an explanation of the term Civilisation, we usually hear an enumeration of the constituents of a state of primal savagery, and are then possibly referred to the material products, money, and Gatling guns of a nation for signs of its civilisation.