Page:Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day.djvu/84

 but the good sense of the people. A death's head and cross bones were not blazoned on my banners.'

He called the great demagogue a 'big beggarman,' who gathered 'rint' from the wretched Irish peasantry by promising to procure a 'repale' for them, which he knew he should never get.

Altogether, Mr. Disraeli had much the best of the correspondence. Few men could write a better letter of accusation or of vindication; and he has been charged with the authorship of the 'Runnymede' letters, which appeared in the 'Times.' They are inferior to the letters of 'Junius,' but they display great powers of invective; and, on internal evidence only, most people would say they were written by Disraeli.

Mr. Disraeli first sat in Parliament for Maidstone, in 1832; and his speeches are, perhaps, the best efforts of his genius. He is a splendid Parliamentary debater, and a perfect master of epigrammatic phrases that stick wherever they are applied. When he wrote 'Tancred,' it was his opinion that 'we sadly lack a new stock of public images. The current similes, if not absolutely counterfeit, are quite worn out. They have no intrinsic value, and serve only as counters to represent the absence of ideas. The critics should really call them in.' No man has done more to replace the old images with new ones than the author of 'Tancred.' Perhaps 'Tancred' is the best book of imagination, and 'Coningsby' of political life, that their author has produced. The style of all his novels is sparkling and clever sometimes, at others turgid and over-daubed with colour.

It is curious that the best specimen of Disraeli's style that can be given in a few lines is not Disraeli's at all, but Thackeray's. In his 'Novels by Eminent Hands,' he has 'Codlingsby: by the Right Hon. B. Shrewsberry'—a wonderfully good imitation in caricature of Disraeli's style.

They entered a moderate-sized apartment—indeed Holywell-street is not above a hundred yards long, and this chamber was not more than half that length—and fitted up with the simple taste of its owner.

The carpet was of white velvet—laid over several webs of Aubusson, Ispahan, and Axminster, so that your foot gave no more sound as it trod upon the yielding plain than the shadow which followed you—of white velvet painted with flowers, arabesques, and classic figures by Sir William Ross, J. M. W. Turner, R.A., Mrs. Mee, and Paul Delaroche. The edges were wrought with seed-pearl, Valenciennes lace, and bullion. The walls were hung with cloth of silver, embroidered