By the end of the week, the British public will
be in posses- sion of a new work of imagination by Lord Beaconsfield, which is to be called " Endymion," and we are assured that lie is himself in some degree the hero of it, or at least one of the heroes. It is rumoured to be political, but to concern the politics of the past. Probably the legend of Endymion will be made to bear some sort of political meaning, though it is very hard to guess what. In the old Greek story, Endymion is chiefly remarkable for sleeping ; and as, so far as we can judge, Lord Beaconsfield himself has always been remarkably wide awake, we can hardly imagine even his fancy equal to depicting himself as a famous sleeper, even though one whose dreams are occa- sionally broken by a fond vision of ethereal beauty. Professor Max Muller, we believe, holds Endymion to be an embodiment of the setting sun, over whose parting rays the rising moon. bends fondly ; but even that does not much help the matter, for Lord Beaconsfield, though a setting sun now, was certainly not a setting sun at the time to which the story is said to refer, nor can we imagine of what fair political vision he has been enamoured. It is hardly possible that the Diana of his dreams can have been that not too pure divinity, the compound house- holder of the Ten Minutes' Bill,—the ten minutes' rapture.
