This speech became famous. O'Connell, who, like Disraeli himself, bore no malice, when asked his opinion of it said it was all excellent except the peroration, and that was matchless. Disraeli, who had calmly watched the effect of his assaults, told his sister that 'Peel was stunned and stupefied, lost his head, and vacillating between silence and spleen, spoke much and weakly, assuring me that I had not hurt his feelings, that he would never reciprocate personalities, having no venom, &c. &c.' A wasp which you cannot kill buzzing round your face and stinging when it has a chance will try the patience of the wisest. The Maynooth grant might have been a safe subject, for no one had advocated justice to Ireland more strongly than Disraeli; but he chose to treat it as a bid for the Irish vote. He called Peel 'a great Parliamentary middleman,' swindling both the parties that he professed to serve, and with deadly ingenuity he advised the Roman Catholic members to distrust a man 'whose bleak shade had fallen on the sunshine of their hopes for a quarter of a century.' Driven beside himself at last, either on this or on some similar occasion, I have been assured that Peel forgot his dignity and asked a distinguished friend to carry a challenge from him to his reviler. The friend, unwilling to give Disraeli such a triumph and more careful of Peel's reputation than Peel himself, did not merely refuse, but threatened, if the matter was pursued farther, to inform the police.[9] Disraeli asked Lord John Russell if he was not weary of being dragged at the triumphal car of a conqueror who had not conquered him in fair fight. 'Habitual perfidy,' he said, 'was not high policy of state.' He invited the Whig leader to assist him 'in dethroning the dynasty of deception and putting an end to the intolerable yoke of official despotism and Parliamentary imposture.' [Sidenote: THE CORN LAWS] Though the Free-Traders were revolutionising the tariff old-fashioned statesmen on both sides still hesitated at the entire abolition of the Corn Laws. It had been long assumed that without some protection the soil of England must fall out of cultivation. The Corn Law Leaguers were prepared even for that consummation, although they denied the probability of it. Disraeli, laying aside his personalities, showed in a noble passage that when he chose he could rise to the level of a great subject. He said--