His fine tact disappeared; his touch grew hard and was felt to be a little irresolute; faint traces of irritability ruffled the clear surface of his serene intelligence; and in a sudden emergency he seemed to grow maladroit. The change first became obvious when he attempted to deal with Mr. Plimsoll’s case in 1875, and, as it grew, his personal ascendency over the House of Commons slowly decayed. He seemed to live more and more in dreams, and to grow less and less sensitive to the pulse of popular opinion. It was in this mood that he fell into the two disastrous blunders of his life. [Illustration: LORD BEACONSFIELD’S HOUSE, 19, CURZON STREET, MAYFAIR.] He tried to solve the Eastern Question by applying to it the obsolete ideas of Palmerston. When this mistake led him from one embarrassment to another, he tried to retrieve the situation by applying his own ideas to it. Unfortunately, when he went to find them he looked, not into the depths of his own clear intelligence, but into a romance written by one whom he had known in his youth, and who was styled “D’Israeli the Younger.” “Yes,” he said to a friend who put the question to him in those days, “I sometimes do read ‘Tancred’ now--_for instruction_.” Because the stolid English people grew sick of vainly trying to shape their destinies according to the Tancredian scheme of the universe, Lord Beaconsfield fell from power at the moment when he was most fully persuaded that monarch and multitude were alike under the spell of his picturesque personality. Had he been ten years younger when he obtained the majority of 1874, the crash of 1880 would probably have been averted. There is a strange pathos in the close of this dazzling career. According to Sir Stafford Northcote, the last words he was understood to utter were these: “Is there any _bad_ news in the _Gazette_?”[174]