It is not generally known that Benjamin Disraeli was a pensioner under the Act of 1834. There is but an obscure and passing reference to it in Buckle’s _Life of Lord Beaconsfield_. Lord Derby granted him a first-class pension in June, 1859. Disraeli was the only Prime Minister of modern times who received a political pension. He was in receipt of it when he died as Lord Beaconsfield in April, 1881. The pension was, of course, suspended while he was in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer or First Lord of the Treasury (including his two terms as Prime Minister), but the total amount drawn by him in pensions, between 1859 and 1881, was £26,456 6s. 7d. Other distinguished pensioners under the Act of 1834 were Spencer Walpole, three times Home Secretary, who from May, 1867, until his death in May, 1898, received in the aggregate a sum of £62,032 19s. 4d.; Sir George Grey, four times Home Secretary, who from 1857 to 1882 drew £39,070 2s. 6d.; and Thomas Milner Gibson, President of the Board of Trade, who was paid £35,275 1s. 3d. between 1866 and 1884. The first beneficiary under the Act of 1869 was Charles Pelham Villiers, the associate of Cobden and Bright in the agitation for Free Trade. He entered Parliament for Wolverhampton in 1835, and sat for the same constituency until his death in 1898 at the great age of ninety-six. For some years at the end of his long career as a member of Parliament he was Father of the House of Commons. Villiers has a place among the few public men who have had statues erected to them in their lifetime. He was so honoured by Wolverhampton ten years before his death. Villiers held office in two Liberal Administrations, having been Judge Advocate-General for six years, and for the same period President of the Poor Law Board, an office long since merged in the Local Government Board, now the Ministry of Health. Villiers was awarded a second-class pension of £1,200 by Gladstone on August 19, 1869, a few days after the Political Offices Pensions Act became law. Although this amount was reduced to £450 a year until January 5, 1874, as Villiers had also a pension of £750 from the Suitors’ Fee Fund of the Court of Chancery—is there not quite a touch of eighteenth-century sinecure in this?—Villiers received altogether, under the Act of 1869, the large sum of £30,810 12s. 8d., and was drawing the pension at his death in 1898. It may be said that no man better earned a pension than Villiers. His record of public service is unparalleled in the annals of the House of Commons. But on the proving of his will it was found that he had been a very wealthy man. He left, in fact, a fortune of £250,000.