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to unequivocally acknowledge his error, and to admit that Mr. Hume's letter was, as the Globe and Mr. Hume had asserted, directed to himself.

In the course of this book, we shall be drawn by Lord Beaconsfield into a discussion on the personal veracity and the political consistency of more than one public man. We shall also be asked by Lord Beaconsfield to pronounce judgment on the conduct of more than one public man, towards former friends and colleagues.

These are the very questions we have just been considering in the case of Lord Beaconsfield himself. Lord Beaconsfield's personal veracity, Lord Beaconsfield's political consistency, Lord Beaconsfield's conduct to former friends and colleagues, are all involved in his dispute with the Globe. When he asks us to test other men on those three points, it is not useless to know how he himself came out of a similar examination.

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CHAPTER VII.

THE MAIDEN SPEECH.

THE last letter of Mr. Disraeli to the Times in his controversy with the Globe was published on January 13. On January 19 appeared the first of a series of letters signed "Runnymede." These letters have never been publicly acknowledged by Lord Beaconsfield ; but they bear a strong resemblance in style to other productions from his pen. The letters are addressed to the leading public men of the day; and are in two different styles. When they are directed to a Whig, they are grossly abusive; when to a Conservative, they are as grossly adulatory.

Lord Melbourne is told that he cannot rouse himself "from the embraces of that Siren Desidia, to whose fatal influence you are not less a slave than our second Charles."" "At present," Runnymede says, writing to Lord Brougham-"I am informed that your lordship is occupied in a translation of your treatise on Natural Theology into German on the Hamiltonian system. The translation of a work on a *Times, January 19, 1836.

subject of which you know little, into a tongue of which you know nothing, seems the climax of those fantastic freaks of ambitious superficiality which our lively neighbours describe by a finer term than quackery."*

Lord John Russell is told that he was "born with a strong ambition and a feeble intellect ;" that he is the author of "the feeblest tragedy in our language," "the feeblest romance in our literature," and "the feeblest political essay on record." He is "cold, inanimate, with a weak voice and a mincing manner; and finally, if a traveller were informed that such a man was leader of the English House of Commons, he "may begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an INSECT."†

Addressing Lord Palmerston,‡ "Runnymede" says: "You owe the Whigs great gratitude, my lord, and therefore, I think, you will betray them."

Let me pause to ask if "Runnymede," when he wrote this, were drawing a general inference from a particular case? Did he think political betrayal always followed political obligation, because Mr. Disraeli had been so lately shown to have betrayed O'Connell and Joseph Hume?

The letter to Lord Palmerston, towards the end, contains this fine burst: "Oh, my country! fortunate, thrice fortunate, England! with your destines at such a moment entrusted to the Lord Fanny of diplomacy! † Ibid., February 1.

Ibid.. January 25.

Ibid., February 22.

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Methinks I can see your lordship, the Sporus of politics. cajoling France with an airy compliment, and menacing Russia with a perfumed cane."

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Sir John Hobhouse, the friend of Byron, was also assailed. "Runnymede was inexpressibly shocked at seeing a Radical like Hobhouse sitting on the same bench with an ex-Tory like Palmerston. "Runnymede" did not, like Mr. Disraeli, think that the Tory party was the really democratic party, and could, therefore, be supported by men of Radical principles. "You have met, indeed," writes the uncompromising and elegant-spoken "Runnymede "-"you have met, indeed, like the Puritan and the Prostitute on the banks of Lethe, in Garrick's farce, with an equally convenient oblivion of the characteristic incidents of your previous careers; you giving up your annual Parliaments and universal suffrage, he casting to the winds his close corporations and borough nominees; you whispering Conservatism on the hustings once braying with your revolutionary uproar, he spouting Reform in the still recesses of the dust of Downing Street; the one reeking from a Newgate cell, the other redolent of the boudoirs of Mayfair-yet both of them, alike the Tory underling and the Radical demagogue, closing the ludicrous contrast with one grand diapason of harmonious inconsistency, both merging in the Whig Minister."

In striking contrast to the tone of those letters to the Whig leaders is that † to Sir Robert Peel, the *Ibid., March 2. † Ibid., January 27, 1836.

Conservative chief. Not only is Peel complimented on his own extraordinary virtues, but allusion is made, in a manner equally characteristic and vulgar, to the great man's material prosperity. "Before you receive this letter," says the enthusiastic and Jenkins-like admirer of the Conservative leader," Before you receive this letter, you will, in all probability, have quitted the halls and bowers of Drayton; those gardens and that library where you have realized the romance of Verulam, and where you enjoy the 'lettered leisure that Temple loved."

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Then the very commonplace incident of Peel's journey to London is described in a manner that might make a penny-a-liner burst with envy. The journey of such a great man is not called a journey at all it is a "progress to the metropolis." That progress," Peel is then told, "may not be as picturesque as that which you experienced twelve months back, when the confidence of your Sovereign and the hopes of your country summoned you from the galleries of the Vatican and the city of the Cæsars. It may not be as picturesque, but it is not less proud -it will be more triumphant."

Rising to a Monadic frenzy of eulogium as he goes along, the eulogist styles Peel "the only hope of a suffering people." Then, Whiggery is described in terms that one cannot read without laughter. "The mighty dragon is again abroad, depopulating our fields, wasting our pleasant places, poisoning our fountains, menacing our civilisation."

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