[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
giE,•-4 think your correspondent Mr. Oakley (Spectator, June 11th) is a little 'hard upon Disraeli as to what he calls his "conveyance (coupled with animus furancli)" in respect of the matter taken from Thiers. Unless my memory misleads me, Disraeli himself, on being challenged with what was at first called, as Mr. Oakley calls it, a theft, put in what lawyers would call "a plea of confession and avoidance." He said (either in the House of Commons or in a letter to the Press) that some years before his speech upon the Duke of Welling- ton, the Hon. George Smyth (afterwards Lord Strangford) had mentioned to him that he bad seen "somewhere or other" a striking summing up of the qualities required to make a great general. These remarks, without knowing their source, he had copied into his commonplace-book, and incorporated into his speech when it was his duty to make a great general's panegyric. And in this, if I remember rightly, he was cor- roborated by his informant. Is no man to use an idea which he cannot warrant original at the moment, or cannot tell whence or from whom he originally acquired it P—I am,
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