[2] Swift, adverting to National Debt.
[3] Cardinal Newman afterwards inveighed against the same union of faithlessness and Mammon in one of his finest sermons. Disraeli constantly dwelt on the dangers that liberty might suffer, if a democracy unreconciled to monarchy and its institutions became a class instead of an element, and was brought into collision with the “three per cents.” The despotisms of bare democracy and of aggravated plutocracy were equally distasteful to him, and he feared their union. Cf. many striking passages in The Press, 1853–59.
[4] With this passage should be compared the striking remarks on p. 222 of The Political Biography of Lord George Bentinck.
[5] “It was that noble ambition, the highest and the best, that must be born in the heart and organised in the brain, which will not let a man be content unless his intellectual power is recognised by his race, and desires that it should contribute to their welfare.” Thus he speaks of Coningsby, the castle of whose fathers is not to be one “of Indolence.”
[6] Through Lord Durham, Lord J. Russell, and Lord Melbourne, whom he met early at Mrs. Norton’s.
[7] I may mention that when he wrote Alarcos in six weeks, an intimate (I think Lord Strangford) asked him why he had turned his energies to tragedy. “The idea haunted me,” was the reply, “and I could not rest until I had given it expression.”
[8] There is a touch also of his grandfather in the “Mr. Putney Giles” of Lothair, who: “never made difficulties, but always overcame them.” In both “Miriam” (Alroy) “Venetia” and “Myra” (Endymion) there are direct transferences from his sister’s temperament; and “St. Barbe” is far more Hayward than Thackeray.
[9] Cf. the moralisations in its strange account of the hero’s malady.
[10] The Infernal Marriage.
[11] So called owing to Lord Grey’s query in a letter. His brother had just opposed the young Disraeli, standing as an “independent” and a “reformer” at High (or “Chepping”) Wycombe; and his brilliant speeches on the hustings had been republished as The Crisis Examined.