A hundred years ago
Front the 'Spectator', 12 March 1870—Mr. Disraeli was "indisposed"—and Lord Derby and Lord Salisbury apparently unable—to attend the Conservative banquet in the City on Wednesday, but perhaps the absence of keen and critical eyes put the boisterous Conserva- tives, of whom the banqueters chiefly consisted, —Sir Stafford Northcote being the principal exception,—rather more at their ease, and en- abled them to indulge more freely in those frothing Tory wines by which the failing spirits of the party are from time to time wisely exhilarated. . . Mr. Gathorne Hardy quizzed the Liberal party on the ground that it consists of a head, a centre, and a tail. If any Liberal had been present, he would probably have re- plied that the Tory party consists of the same elementary organisms; but that whereas the Liberal head and centre and tail are all strictly continuous, and connected by the proper verte- bral arrangement, the Tory party is afflicted by a certain discontinuity between its head and its body, and between its body and its tail—the head (Mr. Disraeli) being decidedly severed from the trunk, though still able—as French physiologists maintain that all guillotined heads are—to observe and criticize what is going on in the body; and the tail (Mr. Newdegate), though still following the body at a certain interval, being similarly circumstanced, so far, at least, as tails can be said to have percipient faculties at alL
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