BENJAMIN DISRAELI—POLITICIAN.
In 1837, he entered Parliament, and made a miserable failure as a speaker and was laughed down, but he was not of the stuff to be frightened. Since then he has filled the greatest offices of trust that it is possible for a commoner to fill in England, and at times a radical revolutionist, and then again a most staunch monarchist, he has had greatness of soul enough to refuse a title offered him by the Queen, when he retired from the Cabinet in which he was Prime Minister. The honor tendered him was politely refused with many thanks, but he accepted the title of Viscountess Beaconsfield for his noble and devoted wife, who enriched and has sustained him in all his severest struggles.
It is told of this brave lady, that while accompanying her husband in a carriage to the House one night, Disraeli became lost in thought about a great speech which he was going to make, and the carriage door having closed on one of her fingers, she never uttered a sound of pain until the equippage drove into the Palace yard at Westminster, when the footman jumped down, and she fainted in her husband's arms. One hundred and fifty thousand copies of Disraeli's "Lothair" have been sold, and it is more than probable that the sale will not stop short of 250,000 copies. The bitterest article in review of this book was written in Blackwood's Magazine, by Lawrence Oliphant, author of the "Piccadilly Papers by a Peripatetic," in London Society. Mr. Oliphant deserted fashionable London society to found a Communistic association on the shores of Lake Erie, and having accumulated a secretion of gall and wormwood there he went back to England and poured it out on the head of Disraeli.
CHARLES KINGSLEY—NOVELIST.
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
The Rev. Charles Kingsley, formerly rector of Eversley and Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, and now Dean of Rochester, is the defender of Muscular Christianity in English literature. He is the son of a clergyman, and is descended from the ancient Saxon family of the Kingsleys, of Kingsley, in the Forest of Delamere. He was educated at Kings College, London, and Magdalen College, Cambridge, and is nearly fifty years of age. From his advocacy of the cause of the workingmen he has been called the "Chartist Parson." His chief works are, "Hypatia, or New Foes with Old Faces," "Alexandria and Her Schools," "Westward, Ho," "Two Years ago," and "Hereward, Last of the Saxons." He delivered the "Roman and Teuton Lectures" while professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. He has also written a series of children's books on historical subjects, which are very popular in England. His brother, Henry Kingsley, a novelist of considerable reputation, is eleven years younger, and is a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, the oldest periodical of its kind in England, which is sold for one shilling.
Anthony Trollope, the most voluminous English novelist now living, was born in 1815, and comes of a literary family, his mother having made a certain sort of fame by her book of American travels which did not redound to her credit. Many years after the issue of Mrs. Trollope's book, her son visited America and sought to redeem the unfavorable impression made by his parent's villification of our people, in his "North America," published in 1861. Anthony Trollope was educated at Winchester and Harrow, and at thirty-two years of age wrote his first novel, "The McDermotts of Ballycloran," a picture of Irish middle class life. Since then he has furnished to the publishers of his works enough material to fill a small library. Many of his genial novels appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, which was edited by Thackeray at one time, and subsequently by Frederick Greenwood, who was, during the former's management, a proof reader on the Cornhill, and is now the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, the establishment of which journal was the realization of the dream of Thackeray's life.