If a Whig had been asked ten or a dozen years ago, or indeed six years back, to write his impressions of Mr. Disraeli, he would have set about it in a strikingly different spirit from that which the task awakens now. Lord Beaconsfield has recently become much too serious a joke in the national history, but for a very long time the jocosity was light enough. In the eyes of all Liberals who had not fully acquired the gravity of their own fundamental principles, there was, down to a very late period, always something diverting about Mr. Disraeli. He might and did vex them, but shortly they were again smiling at him. The explanation was this, that for a long time his presence in Parliament hardly at all hindered the progress of Liberal measures. Whenever a legislative reform was proposed, he invariably spoke against it, and at some stage afterwards the Conservatives voted in a body the same way. From the voting being subsequent to the speaking, there was an illusive appearance of Mr. Disraeli's speechifying being the cause of the Tory division list. But, in reality, there was no such connection, and the Liberals were aware of it. They all knew that the Conservatives would have voted just the same without a word being spoken. If, during all the years Lord Palmerston was in power, almost the whole of Lord Russell's earlier and later official terms, and down to nearly the end of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry, Mr. Disraeli, instead of making speeches, had amused his audience by pirouetting on one leg night after night, the practical result would have been exactly the same. It could not have been so entertaining to the Liberals, because, looking at some members of the Conservative party, it would have exceeded the bounds of belief to suppose that Mr. Disraeli was really twirling for the whole, whereas it did somehow come to be accepted that he was speaking for all of them. The unlooked-for thoughts he pretended to put into their minds, and the preposterous words he did put upon their lips, kept all Englishmen who were not Conservatives shaking their sides with laughter. It was as if a foreign Will-o'-the-Wisp had strayed into the British Parliament, always, however, keeping himself and his antics on the Conservative side, as being, we suppose, the worst-drained part of the House, where the morasses lay. Even when, to the amazement of the country generally, Mr. Disraeli found his way into office, the merriment did not stop. Nobody who has reached mature years can forget what an astounding drollery it was thought to be when Mr. Disraeli was made Chancellor of the Exchequer by Lord Derby. For the time it seemed to convert English politics into pantomime. Will-o'-the-Wisp had been asked by the country party to undertake the post of chief financier. Everybody on the other side was prepared beforehand to laugh at his Budgets; and, when they were propounded, the Liberals did laugh a little more even than they had expected to do. When he brought in