This persistent opposition to Disraeli throughout his whole career—an hostility more bitter than perhaps might have been expected from Ruskin's "polite Whig"—was esteemed at its full importance by the object of it, though it was accepted by him, as similar attacks are accepted by all great minds, in excellent part. Nevertheless, after only three or four years of attack, he made a determined though unsuccessful attempt to conciliate his pungent critic. Vizetelly, in his "Glances Back through Seventy Years," tells the story with all the interest belonging to a personal recollection.

"In the summer of 1845," he says, "Mr. Disraeli took the chair at the annual dinner of the 'Printers' Pension Society,' when the stewards, of whom I was one, received him in the drawing-room of the 'Albion,' in Aldersgate Street. Immediately after his entrance he posted himself in a nonchalant fashion with his back to the mantelpiece, and his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, an attitude Thackeray was fond of assuming, and began to chat familiarly with those near him. In a minute or two he asked if Mr. Leech was present (Leech was one of the stewards), as if he would like to make his acquaintance. The famous Punch caricaturist thereupon stepped forward, and was duly introduced. Disraeli showed himself particularly gracious, and warmly congratulated the artist, whose pencil had lately been employed in satirising him in a disparaging fashion, depicting him as a nice young man for a small party, i.e. the Young England party, as a Jew dealer in cast-off notions, and as a young Gulliver before the Brobdingnag Minister (Sir R. Peel). Disraeli tried his hardest to ingratiate himself with the distinguished caricaturist, but Leech, proof against the wiles of the charmer, rejoined some months afterwards with the famous cartoon wherein Disraeli, who had lately proclaimed that, although the cause was lost, there should be some retribution for those who betrayed it, figured as a spiteful ringletted viper, and Peel as a smiling unconcerned old file.

"During the dinner the chairman did his best to make himself pleasant, and hobbed and nobbed unreservedly with his immediate neighbours.... When the toasts had been drunk and the secretary had read out the list of subscriptions and the quiet family-men had hurried off to catch the last suburban omnibus, Mr. Disraeli showed no disposition to vacate the chair. Seeing this, the remaining guests drew up to his end of the table, and a lively discourse ensued, in which a casual allusion to Punch was made. Disraeli profited by this by rising to his feet, and in a clever and amusing speech proposed the health of Mr. Punch, towards whom, he protested, he felt no kind of malice on account of any strictures, pictorial or verbal, which that individual might have passed upon him. Everybody entered into the spirit of the joke, and after the toasts had been drunk, calls were made indifferently upon Lemon and à Beckett, both of whom were present, to respond. Mark, however, rose, and in a brief and witty speech returned thanks for the honour that had been done, as he neatly put it, to an absent friend.

"Disraeli's amiable advances availed him nothing. For a long time afterwards Punch gave no quarter to the 'Red Indian of debate' who, as Sir James Graham pithily phrased it, 'cut his way to power with a tomahawk.' The time came, however, when Disraeli could show his magnanimity. Leech, who had satirised him weekly, and so familiarised everyone with his face and figure that an aristocratic little damsel, on being presented to him, exclaimed, 'I know you! I've seen you in Punch!'—Leech had had a pension given to him by the Liberals, and when he died the pension would have died with him, had not Disraeli, who had at last risen to power, interposed and secured it to the family." And so Leech, who apparently could not make an enemy, was indebted to the generosity of his victims for two of the greatest services that were rendered to him and his.

Lord Beaconsfield himself acknowledged in his latest book, "Endymion," his respect for Punch's influence at that time, as well as his desire to temper the ardour of its attacks if not to secure its silence, for he there explains how the hero, who to some degree at least is to be considered an autobiographical study, "flattered himself that 'Scaramouche'" would regard him in a more friendly spirit. Punch, with pardonable pride, devoted a cartoon to this pointed reference, but merely remarking, "H'm—he did flatter himself," abated not one jot of his caustic criticism.

But for all the failure of his advances, and for all his sensitiveness—so far as he could be said to be sensitive at all—Beaconsfield kept a close eye on Punch, and kept many, if not all, of the cartoons in which he figured. Similarly did Napoleon III. love to collect all those of himself which he could obtain, and pore over them at intervals, even in those sadly fallen times he spent at Chislehurst. And he had material for reflection enough, for in no way, I take it, can a public man learn what a world of savagery, hatred, cruelty, and uncharitableness lies, not so much in man's mind, but in that corner of it which we euphemistically term his "humour," as in following the handiwork of the political caricaturist of France. Mr. Spurgeon, too, used to keep all the cartoons and caricatures that sought to turn him to ridicule; and Lord Beaconsfield, like the Prince Consort, Lord Randolph Churchill (who possessed several of the original Punch drawings into which he had been introduced), among other politicians of the day, kept these artistic instruments of political torture before him, as a man treasures in his locket the hair of the dog that bit him. A visitor to Hughenden gave, in the "Dublin Mail," an interesting illustration of this tribute to the comic press. He was waiting in an ante-chamber, "and while passing the time my attention was attracted to a clever sketch of the then Prime Minister, depicted as Hamlet, seated at a table covered with innumerable documents, the text quotation being, 'The time is out of joint. O Cursed spite, That [ever] I was born to set it right!' I was smiling at the picture, which, I may add, was a cut out of Punch, and framed, when the Prime Minister entered with the gentleman who was to present me, and finding me gazing at the sketch Lord Beaconsfield said, 'Yes, that is one of the best caricatures of me that has yet appeared, and, strange to say, the artist has neither presented me with donkey's ears nor cloven hoofs. I feel very much flattered!' Lord Beaconsfield took an interest in all the caricatures that appeared of him, and at the time he died he had several hundreds in his possession."

Mr. Gladstone, who, we have often been assured, has not the gift of humour, has at least enjoyed Punch's good-natured yet occasionally severe raillery, and in the same Edinburgh speech to which reference has already been made, he recalled with much relish how, in connection with the rejection of the Paper Duty Bill, he was represented in a cartoon as being decorated by the triumphant Lord Derby—the Lord Derby of that day, who led the House of Lords—with an immense sheet of paper made into a fool's-cap, which he dropped upon his head. Mr. Goschen took a still more exalted view of Punch's prestige when he declared (at Rugby, November, 1881) that "he had since attained to the highest ambition which a statesman can reach—namely, to have a cartoon in Punch all to himself."

LORD BEACONSFIELD IN "PUNCH."
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By R. Doyle, J. Leech, J. Tenniel, C. Keene, L. Sambourne, and H. Furniss. (Re-drawn by Harry Furniss.)