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of capital, a freeholder, a gentleman to be respected, and over whom even a burgess could not affect the least superiority. The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you can't do. Why did Mr. Disraeli take the duties of chancellor of the exchequer with so much relish? Because people said he was a novelist, an ad cap tandum man. . . who could not add up. No doubt it pleased his inmost soul to do the work of the red-tape people better than those who could do nothing else. And so with Shakespeare,- it pleased him to be respected by those whom he had respected with boyish reverence but who had rejected the imaginative man on their own ground and in their own subject, by the only title which they would regard, in a word, as a moneyed man. We seem to see him eyeing the burgesses with good-humored fellowship, and genial though suppressed and halfconscious contempt, drawing out their old stories, acquiescing in their foolish notions, with everything in his head and easy sayings upon his tongue, a full mind and a deep dark eye that played upon an easy scene now in fanciful solitude, now in cheerful society, now occupied with deep thoughts, now and equally so with trivial recreations, forgetting the dramatist in the man of substance, and the poet in the happy companion; beloved and even respected, with a hope for every one and a smile for all." Mr. Bagehot's own success as a banker and economist certainly pleased him not a little, and for the same reason. As a boy he was thought a metaphysical dreamer by those who did not know him well. And he was always laughing at himself because he could not make figures "add up." Nevertheless, after a year or two's study of law, and after being called to the Bar, he exchanged the law for the counting-house, with some tinge probably of the same motive which he here attributes to Shakespeare. Certainly much of the pleasure of his great success and a great success it was; for the leading men of both Liberal and Conservative governments consulted him eagerly on financial questions, and often followed his advice consisted in the thought that he had attained that success in the most practical and apparently the least dreamy of all pursuits, in spite of an imagination that ranged into the highest subjects, and at one time gained him the reputation of incapacity for practical life.

"Grave, tranquil, decorous pageantry is a part, as it were, of the essence of the last age. There is nothing more characteristic of Gibbon. A kind of pomp pervades him. He is never out of livery. He ever selects for narration the themes which look most like a levée. Grave chamberlains seem to stand throughout; life is a vast ceremony, the historian at once the dignitary and the scribe. [Nevertheless] the manner of the 'Decline and Fall' is almost the last which should be recommended for strict imitation. It is not a style in which you can tell the truth. . . . The petty order of sublunary matters, the common gross existence of ordinary people, the necessary littlenesses of necessary life, are little suited to his sublime narrative." And again, "The truth clearly is, that Gibbon had arrived at the conclusion that he was the sort of person a populace kill. People wonder a great deal why very many of the victims of the French Revolution were particularly selected; the Marquis de Custine especially cannot divine why they executed his father. The historians cannot show that they committed any particular crime. The marquises and marchionesses seem very inoffensive. The fact is, they were killed for being polite. The world felt itself unworthy of it. There were so many bows, such regular smiles, such calm, supreme condescension,— could a mob be asked to stand it? Have we not all known a precise, formal, patronizing old gentleman,— bland, imposing, something like Gibbon? Have we not suffered from his dignified attentions? If we had been on the Committee of Public Safety, can we doubt what would have been the fate of that man? Just so, wrath and envy destroyed in France an upper-class world." This was taken partly from his own observation. Mr. Bagehot was in France at the time of the coup d'état of 1851, and very vividly he described the impression which the revolutionary passion of the Reds made upon him. "Of late," he wrote to a friend, "I have been devoting my entire attention to the science of barricades, which I found amusing. They have systematized it in a way which is pleasing to the cultivated intellect. We had only one good day's fighting, and I naturally kept out of cannon-shot. But I took a quiet walk over the barricades in the morning, and superintended the construction of three with as much keenness as if I had Again, what vividness is there in this been clerk of the works. You've seen description of the historian Gibbon!-lots, of course, at Berlin, but I should not

think those Germans were up to a real | in making a great Parliamentary and polit Montagnard, who is the most horrible be- ical reputation. But it does not follow ing to the eye I ever saw,-sallow, sin- that because he was a man of much higher cere, sour fanaticism, with grizzled mous- and wider intellectual range than many of taches, and a strong wish to shoot you them, he would have succeeded too. As rather than not. The Montagnards are a we have said, his mind was not a mind scarce commodity, the real race,- only which got merged in his work and duties. three or four, if so many, to a barricade. It was a mind which he kept singularly The rest are mere shop-boys and gamins, detached from them, and this was one of who get knocked about by the Fraternité the great obstacles to his popularity. He fanatics, if they put the stones wrong, or was a thorough Liberal so far as a steady don't upset the cabs to an inch." Till belief in the educational advantages of the Revolution came, I had no end of popular institutions, and especially of wide trouble to find conversation, but now and directly practical discussions, could they'll talk against everybody, and against make him a Liberal, but he had no symthe president like mad,- and they talk pathy with the "enthusiasms" of the Libimmensely well, and the language is like eral party, and was, in a humorous way, a razor, capital if you are skilful, but almost proud of belonging to a county sure to cut you if you aren't. A fellow which, as he used to say, "would not subcan talk German in crude forms, and I scribe a thousand pounds to be representdon't see it sounds any worse, but this ed by an archangel." "I hate the Liberal stuff is horrid unless you get it quite enthusiast," he once wrote to a friend. right. A French lady made a striking "I feel inclined to say, 'Go home, sir, remark to me: 'C'est une révolution and take a dose of salts, and see if it qui a sauvé la France. Tous mes amis | won't clean it all out of you.' Nature did sont mis en prison. She was immensely not mean me for a popular candidate." delighted that such a pleasing way of saving her country had been found." Mr. Bagehot's stay in France, short as it was, confirmed him in his profound English reserve; and also in his lively dread of that ready-made, neat-looking theory which, even to his mind, added so much to the attractiveness of French literature, while it squared so ill with the complexity of actual life. Yet his admiration for the effectiveness and perspicuity of French style was almost unlimited, though he regarded the French audacity of generalization as a grave warning, not as a seductive example. Perhaps his familiarity with it taught him that disposition to scoff at mere literature, and that deep belief in the educating power of all large mercantile life, which he was always expressing, sometimes with humorous exaggeration, sometimes with earnest conviction. "You see," he once wrote to a friend, "I have hunting, banking, ships, publishers, an article, and a Christmas to do, all at once, and it is my opinion they will all get muddled. A muddle will print, however, though it won't add up,which is the real advantage of literature." It is of course difficult to decide, as it is difficult to answer all hypothetical questions, whether Mr. Bagehot would have succeeded if he had ever got into Parliament, as in 1866 he was within eight votes of doing for Bridgewater. It is certain enough that dozens of vastly inferior men have at various times succeeded

Clearly not; and even if he had got over that stage of the business, we are not sure that Mr. Bagehot did not a little too distinctly realize the wide chasm between his views and those of the popular party to which he must have belonged, to have exercised a perfectly natural and therefore a powerful influence over political opinion. He was a Liberal of the middle party, and always approved Liberal governments resting on the Liberal-Conservatives, and Conservative governments resting on the Conservative-Liberals, rather than gov ernments of energy, enthusiasm, and action. Yet Mr. Bagehot was a Liberal from conviction, not from prepossession. His book on the British Constitution much the ablest, indeed the only book on the real working of that constitution, and one which has been eagerly welcomed in Germany and France as quite a new light on the true meaning of the British politi cal system-shows that intellectually he would have preferred a conservative republic to a constitutional monarchy, if it had but had the same magic hold on the British people. He did not like the many unreal fictions of constitutional monarchy, nor did he esteem highly the prepossessions in which national fidelity to a hereditary dynasty is rooted. Nevertheless, he steadily maintained that mankind being what it is, the position of a constitutional monarch, if used by a wise and patient sovereign, is one of the most powerful, and one conferring power of the most

band was a Charisi. When I came out as a singer we made it Alcharisi. But there had been a branch of the family who called themselves Deronda, and when I wanted a name for you... I thought of Deronda.

their personal character and their domestic relations, do the ideal and the real Jewess resemble each other. The very dislike to her son which in the fictitious character we are apt hastily to pronounce

In the "Life and Writings of Isaac "unnatural” existed in the real one, and Disraeli," by his son, we read: —

My grandfather, who became an English denizen in 1748, was an Italian descendant from one of those Hebrew families whom the

Inquisition forced to emigrate from the Spanish peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century His ancestors had dropped their Gothic

...

surname on their settlement in the terra

firma, and grateful to the God of Jacob who had sustained them through unprecedented trials and guarded them through unheard-of perils, they assumed the name of DISRAELI, a name never borne before or since by any other family, in order that their race might be forever recognized.

The revolt of Leonora, Princess HalmEberstein's proud, passionate nature against the restrictions and humiliations of her race may be illustrated by a few sentences taken from her confession to Deronda, not, however, strictly observing the order in which they are uttered:

sprang from the same cause. The mother of Isaac Disraeli never pardoned her husband for his name.

[says her grandson] that she lived until eighty So mortified by her social position was she without indulging a tender expression; and did not recognize in her only offspring a being qualified to control or vanquish his impending

fate. His existence only served to swell the gregate of many humiliating particulars. It solace. She foresaw for her child only a future was not to her a source of joy, or sympathy, or of degradation.

I am not a loving woman [cries George Eliot's princess to her son]. It is a talent to love I lacked it. Others have loved me, and I have acted their love. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives or else to be a monster. I am not a monster,

but I have not felt exactly what other women feel - or say they feel for fear of being thought unlike others. I did not wish you to be born. I parted with you willingly. When you reproach me in your heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did not feel that. I was glad to be freed from you. The bondage I hated for myself I wanted to keep you from. What better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the bondage of having been born a Jew.

I was to be what is called "the Jewish woman" [she exclaims]: I was to feel every thing I did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe. . . . I was to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father's endless discoursing about Our People, which was a thunder without meaning in my ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been, and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world and all that I could represent in it. I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to ever as she intends and believes in order do what every one else did.

Might not such a speech as that have come from Mrs. Disraeli, thus described by her grandson?

My grandmother, the beautiful daughter of a family who had suffered much from persecution, had imbibed that dislike for her race which the vain are too apt to adopt when they find that they are born to public contempt. The indignant feeling that should be reserved for the persecutor in the mortification of their disturbed sensibility, is too often visited on the victim. And the cause of annoyance is recognized, not in the ignorant malevolence of the powerful, but in the conscientious convic

Leonora Charisi, in George Eliot's novel, banishes her child finally and for

to free him from the trammels of race and religion. Isaac Disraeli's parents sent the future scholar and author to Amsterdam for some years to rouse him from the dreamy abstraction during which he had produced a poem, and thereby filled both father and mother with terror as to his prospects in life.

When fate and the dread of approaching death prove too powerful even for the princess's strong self-will, and she at last summons her son to her presence in Genoa in order to reveal their relationship, he hurries to the interview in a mood of high-wrought emotion; love, wonder, perplexity, enthusiasm all aflame within him. The two interviews between mother And not only in this comprehensive and son are, on both sides, at the same resentment against the humiliations and abnormal pressure throughout though restrictions of their religion and their some of Leonora's taunts are not unlike race, but in the peculiar warping and dis-"the tart remark and the contemptuous tortion given by this embittered feeling to comment" with which, says Mr. Disraeli,

tion of the innocent sufferer.

his grandmother used frequently to "elicit | vigorous outline, enlarged and filled up, all the irritability of the poetic idiosyn- shaded here and heightened in color there, crasy." The Princess Leonora, however to the uses of the story by the transcencold in her affections, is passionate enough dent genius of George Eliot, supplied the in her disclosures and her unavailing original of Leonora Charisi, Princess wrath against destiny. Halm-Eberstein; or that such striking coincidences of feeling and situation suppose in the novelist a marvellous intuition of the possibilities of Jewish character.