'Very proper of the Queen to offer it,' said the conductor of a Chelsea omnibus to me, 'and more proper of he to say that he would have nothing to do with it. 'Tisn't they who can do honour to the likes of he.' But Disraeli saved his country from the reproach of coming centuries, when Carlyle will stand among his contemporaries as Socrates stands among the Athenians, the one pre-eminently wise man to whom all the rest are as nothing. CHAPTER XVII Retirement from office--Dignity in retreat--Hughenden--Lord Beaconsfield as a landlord--Fondness for country life--'Endymion'--Illness and death--Attempted estimate of Lord Beaconsfield--A great man? or not a great man?--Those only great who can forget themselves--Never completely an Englishman--Relatively great, not absolutely--Gulliver among Lilliputians--Signs in 'Sybil' of a higher purpose, but a purpose incapable of realisation--Simplicity and blamelessness in private life--Indifference to fortune--Integrity as a statesman and administrator. 'Was man in der Jugend wünscht, davon hat man im Alter die Fülle' (What one desires in one's youth one has enough of in one's age). Disraeli had won it all, all that to his young ambition had seemed the only object for which it was worth while to live. Yet he had gained the slippery height only, perhaps, to form a truer estimate of the value of a personal triumph. It was his to hold but for a moment, and then he fell, too late in life to retrieve another defeat. When the shadows lengthen and the sun is going down, earthly greatness fades to tinsel, and nothing is any longer beautiful to look back upon but the disinterested actions, many or few, which are scattered over the chequered career. Disraeli, like many other distinguished men, had to pay the penalty of his character. A fool may have his vanity satisfied with garters and peerages; Disraeli must have been conscious of their emptiness. [Sidenote: FATE OF THE CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT]