One of the best jokes of the speech, and one
curiously illustrative of Mr. Disraeli's " severe accuracy," was directed against Mr. Lowe. A propos of the Ashantee war, Mr. Disraeli ostentatiously took credit for never embarrassing a government in external diffi- culties, and declared he would not treat the Ministers as one of the most distinguished of the Ministers, Mr. Lowe, had treated him on occasion of the Abyssinian war. " He described the horrors of the country and the terrors of the clime " ; the people of England were to prepare themselves for the most awful catastrophe ; " he described not only the fatal influences of the climate, but I remember he described one pink fly, which alone, he said, would eat up the whole British Army. He was as vitu- perative of the insects of Abyssinia as if they had been British workmen." That is very clever, but is it " severely accurate "? Mr. Lowe made but one speech on the Abyssinian war,—in November, 1867,—and in Hansard's account of it we can find no mention at all of any Abyssinian insect, pink or otherwise. The dangerous tsetse-fly, moreover, so celebrated at that time, is not, according to the only reference we have at hand, pink, but brown with yellow bars. Mr. Disraeli was evi- dently more desirous to pink his adversary than to be historical as to his insects. Is not the writer who describes Mr. Disraeli in another column as "never exact as to matters of fact " remarkably justified? In fact, he is the only leader we ever knew of a great English political party who, if he had lived in the right age, might easily have been a great writer of apocryphal Scriptures,— books of Tobit, for instance, or the like, in which he might at once have taken "the side of the angels," and also been "severely accurate "—after his own peculiar fashion.
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