His Style.
Now and then the writing is bad, and the thought is stale. Disraeli had many mannerisms, innate and acquired. His English was frequently loose and inexpressive; he was apt to trip in his grammar, to stumble over ‘and which,’ and to be careless about the connection between his nominatives and his verbs. Again, he could scarce ever refrain from the use of gorgeous commonplaces of sentiment and diction. His taste was sometimes ornately and barbarically conventional; he wrote as an orator, and his phrases often read as if he had used them
for the sake of their associations rather than themselves. His works are a casket of such stage jewels of expression as ‘Palladian structure,’ ‘Tusculan repose,’ ‘Gothic pile,’ ‘pellucid brow,’ ‘mossy cell,’ and ‘dew-bespangled meads.’ He delighted in ‘hyacinthine curls’ and ‘lustrous locks,’ in ‘smiling parterres’ and ‘stately terraces.’ He seldom sat down in print to anything less than a ‘banquet’, he was capable of invoking ‘the iris pencil of Hope’; he could not think nor speak of the beauties of woman except as ‘charms.’ Which seems to show that to be ‘born in a library,’ and have Voltaire—that impeccable master of the phrase—for your chief of early heroes and exemplars is not everything.