plete reputation, as Mr. Disraeli loudly asserts, of the assertions of the Globe. The locality of the meeting between Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Hume was not, of course, the real point of the controversy between the newspaper and Mr. Disraeli. The essential question was whether a meeting took place at all between the Radical leader and the young aspirant; and whether the existing protégé of Lord Lyndhurst should have a few years before been ready to become the protégé of Joseph Hume. The introduction, therefore, of the discussion as to the place of meeting is simply another instance of Lord Beaconsfield's favourite expedientthe expedient of diverting attention from the main and important to a subsidiary and trifling point.

I have said that the letter was violently abusive. Mr. Hume is described as a "man who, after having scraped together a fortune by jobbing in Government contracts in a colony, and entering the House of Commons as the Tory representative of a close corporation, suddenly becomes the apostle of economy and unrestricted suffrage, and closes a career, commenced and matured in corruption, by spouting sedition in Middlesex and counselling rebellion in Canada." And this vehement abuse of Mr. Joseph Hume occurs in the very letter in which Mr. Disraeli acknowledges that he had twice sought Mr. Hume's political patronage! But this is one of the most curious and one of the worst characteristics in Lord Beaconsfield's career. No sense of past alliance, no memory of favours asked and received, of loud-mouthed and even mean-spirited

eulogium, has prevented him from heaping the most vindictive and usually most unjust attacks on other public men. The air rings with his cries of hate before the echoes of his shouts of praise have died away. Notable instances have already been given of this system of alternately shameless praise and shameless abuse of the very same men; of savage bites at the same hand that but a short season before was fawningly kissed. As our narrative proceeds, a still more remarkable, more memorable, and even more shameless instance of this line of conduct towards individuals will be given. What is the only, the inevitable conclusion from such facts in Lord Beaconsfield's life? What, but that all his actions towards others have been solely dictated by his own personal interests; that his professions of uncalculating affection were mere disguised selfishness; that his simple and sole desire has been to use all other men for his own purposes?

The very day after the appearance of his self-confident and insulting letter to Mr. Joseph Hume, Mr. Disraeli was himself compelled to supply the most damning proof of his untrustworthiness as a narrator of facts. One of the many points in dispute between him, the Globe, and Mr. Joseph Hume, was as to whether the letter of the latter was addressed to him direct, or through a third person. Several times over Mr. Disraeli had repeated the assertion that the note reached him indirectly. In a letter to the Times, he has

* January 13, 1836.

to unequivocally acknowledge his error, and to admit that Mr. Hume's letter was, as the Globe and Mr. Hume had asserted, directed to himself.

In the course of this book, we shall be drawn by Lord Beaconsfield into a discussion on the personal veracity and the political consistency of more than one public man. We shall also be asked by Lord Beaconsfield to pronounce judgment on the conduct of more than one public man, towards former friends and colleagues.

These are the very questions we have just been considering in the case of Lord Beaconsfield himself. Lord Beaconsfield's personal veracity, Lord Beaconsfield's political consistency, Lord Beaconsfield's conduct to former friends and colleagues, are all involved in his dispute with the Globe. When he asks us to test other men on those three points, it is not useless to know how he himself came out of a similar examination.

145

CHAPTER VII.

THE MAIDEN SPEECH.

THE last letter of Mr. Disraeli to the Times in his controversy with the Globe was published on January 13. On January 19 appeared the first of a series of letters signed "Runnymede." These letters have never been publicly acknowledged by Lord Beaconsfield; but they bear a strong resemblance in style to other productions from his pen. The letters are addressed to the leading public men of the day; and are in two different styles. When they are directed to a Whig, they are grossly abusive; when to a Conservative, they are as grossly adulatory.

Lord Melbourne is told that he cannot rouse himself "from the embraces of that Siren Desidia, to whose fatal influence you are not less a slave than our second Charles."* "At present," Runnymede says, writing to Lord Brougham-" I am informed that your lordship is occupied in a translation of your treatise on Natural Theology into German on the Hamiltonian system. The translation of a work on a *Times, January 19, 1836.

subject of which you know little, into a tongue of which you know nothing, seems the climax of those fantastic freaks of ambitious superficiality which our lively neighbours describe by a fiuer term than quackery.'

Lord John Russell is told that he was "born with a strong ambition and a feeble intellect ;" that he is the author of "the feeblest tragedy in our language," "the feeblest romance in our literature," and "the feeblest political essay on record." He is "cold, inanimate, with a weak voice and a mincing manner;" and finally, if a traveller were informed that such a man was leader of the English House of Commons, he "may begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an INSECT." †

Addressing Lord Palmerston," Runnymede" says: "You owe the Whigs great gratitude, my lord, and therefore, I think, you will betray them."

Let me pause to ask if "Runnymede," when he wrote this, were drawing a general inference from a particular case? Did he think political betrayal always followed political obligation, because Mr. Disraeli had been so lately shown to have betrayed O'Connell and Joseph Hume?

The letter to Lord Palmerston, towards the end, contains this fine burst: "Oh, my country! fortunate, thrice fortunate, England! with your destines at such a moment entrusted to the Lord Fanny of diplomacy! † lbid., February 1.

*Ibid., January 25.

Ibid., February 22.