Disraeli's speeches during Peel's Ministry and the effects which they produced can be touched but superficially in a narrative so brief as this, but they formed the turning-point of his public life. His assaults when he began were treated with petulant contempt, but his fierce counter-hits soon roused attention to them. The Liberals were entertained to see the Conservative chief dared and smitten by one of his own followers. The country members felt an indignant satisfaction at the deserved chastisement of their betrayer. The cheers in Parliament were echoed outside the walls and rang to the farthest corner of the Continent. With malicious skill Disraeli touched one after the other the weak points of a character essentially great but superficially vulnerable. Like Laertes he anointed his point, but the venom lay in the truth of what he said, and the suffering which he inflicted was the more poignant because administered by a hand which Peel had unfortunately despised. Disraeli was displaying for the first time the peculiar epigrammatic keenness which afterwards so much distinguished him, and the skill with which he could drive his arrows through the joints in the harness. Any subject gave him an opening. Peel supposed that he had rebuked and silenced him by quoting in a dignified tone Canning's lines upon 'A Candid Friend.' The allusion was dangerous, for Peel's conduct to Canning had not been above reproach. Disraeli took an occasion when the general policy of the Ministry was under discussion to deliver himself in his clear, cold, impassive manner of a few sentences which hit exactly the temper of the House. Peel was generally accused of having stolen the Liberal policy. The right honourable gentleman, he said, had caught the Whigs bathing and had walked away with their clothes. He had tamed the shrew of Liberalism by her own tactics. He was the 'political Petruchio who had outbid them all.' Then came the sting. Peel had a full memory, and was rather proud of the readiness with which he could introduce quotations. Disraeli first touched his vanity by complimenting him on the success with which he used such weapons, 'partly because he seldom quoted a passage which had not previously received the meed of Parliamentary approbation, partly because his quotations were so happy.... We all admire Canning,' he said; 'we all, or at least most of us, deplore his untimely end. We sympathised with him in his fierce struggle with supreme prejudice and sublime mediocrity, with inveterate foes and with candid friends. Mr. Canning! and quoted by the right honourable gentleman. The theme, the poet, the speaker!--what a felicitous combination!'