• LORD CROMER ON DISRAELI.
(To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR.") SIR,—Perhaps as good an answer as can be given to Earl Cromer's reference to Disraeli as "this nimble-witted alien adventurer" is furnished by Lord Beaconsfield himself. The quotation is from "Coningsby " "He felt that he must be prepared for great sacrifices, for infinite suffering ; that there must devolve on him a bitter in- heritance of obscurity, struggle, envy, and hatred, vulgar prejudice, base criticism, petty hostilities, but the dawn would break, and the hour arrive when the welcome morning hymn of his success and his fame would sound and be re-echoed?'
Lord Beaconsfield's principal assets were self-confidence and will-power. As a novelist he is hardly in the second rank, though he has succeeded in persuading a good many people to place him in the first. And by his showy but rather cheap foreign policy be has also succeeded in leading a still larger number of people to laud him as a great statesman. He is one of the very few men with an artistic temperament who have succeeded in politics. His flamboyant style and oracular manner were taken quite seriously by his supporters. But to others he was without sincerity; while to others, again, he has always been a complete mystery.— Cocoa Tree, St. James's Street, S.W.
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