to a Commissionership in the Inland Revenue, and died, rather suddenly, in 1868. Ralph, who also owes his elevation to his better-known brother, still holds the office of Deputy Clerk of Parliaments.

The first of the family to settle in England was Benjamin D'Israeli, grandfather of the present bearer of the same name. As to the history of the family before their arrival in England, we have to rely wholly on the authority of Lord Beaconsfield; and his story is somewhat fanciful. His grandfather, he tells us, 1 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, and who found a refuge in the more tolerant territories of the Venetian Republic." In their new home they dropped their "Gothic surname," 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 for ever recognised."

Continuing the story in the same strain, he tells us that the Disraelis belonged to the higher Jewish caste of the Sephardim, and that they were related to the very best Hebrew families. It is not explained to us why Disraeli should be considered a name so peculiar in a Jew: it is simply Israel, with a 'd' prefixed, and a vowel added: in other words, an Italianized form of one of the very commonest of Jewish names. Nor does Lord Beaconsfield explain why a name so peculiar, and by which the race was to "be for ever recognised," has been changed by himself. His father always spelled the name "D'Israeli," and

it. My unfinished labours, frustrated designs, remain paralysed. In a joyous heat I wander no longer through the wide circuit before me. The strucken deer has the sad privilege to weep when he lies down, perhaps no more to course amid those far-distant woods where once he sought to range. Although thus compelled to refrain in a great measure from all mental labour, and incapacitated from the use of the pen and the book, these works notwithstanding have received many important corrections, having been read over to me with critical precision. Amid this partial darkness I am not left without a distant hope, nor a present consolation; and to HER who has so often lent to me the light of her eyes, the intelligence of her voice, and the careful work of her hand, the author must ever owe 'the debt immense' of paternal gratitude."

Mr. H. G. Bohn, the eminent publisher, in a letter to the Richmond and Twichenham Times, August 3, 1878, gives the following interesting particulars with regard to Mr. Meredith, the bethrothed of Miss Disraeli: "The Mr. Meredith who was engaged to marry Miss Sarah D'Israeli was an accomplished and highly-educated gentleman, the nephew and adopted heir of Mr. William Meredith, a retired contractor of considerable wealth who had remained a confirmed celibate to an advanced age. His name had become familiar in literary circles in consequence of his liberal patronage of Mr. Thomas Taylor, the so-called Platonist, whose translation of Aristotle in ten volumes quarto, and many other translations from the Greek, he encouraged and paid for to the extent of several thousand pounds, besides granting him an annuity for life. Mr. Meredith's great enjoyment was literary society, to which end he used during the London season to give monthly dinners-literary symposia to parties of eight, rarely more, at which, besides myself, were usually present Mr. Thomas Taylor, Mr. Forsyth, Mr. Day, the Poor Law Commissioner, Mr. Meredith, junior, and occasionally one or both the D'Israelis. There were others, but I don't remember their names. The eldest Mr. Meredith died late in the summer of 1831, and with the exception of the annuity already granted to Mr. Thomas Taylor, bequeathed all his property, including a fine library, to the nephew in question, who, however, died of fever at Gibraltar on his way home, a few days after his uncle, and before he could receive tidings of the event. In consequence of this, the property passed to his father's rather numerous family, which was by no means originally intended. Miss D'Israeli retired to Twickenham in 1832, where she resided till within a short time of her death, in one of the Ailsa Park villas, solacing herself with charitable pursuits and the cultivation of her small garden." The inscription on her monument is as follows: "In Memory of Sarah, only Daughter of Isaac D'Israeli, Esqre., Author of Curiosities of Literature. Born 29th Decr., 1802. Died 19th Decr., 1859." The monument consists of a Maltese Cross, which bears the letters I.H.S., and at the junction of the arms is the inscription "Thy will be done," graven in old English characters.

1" Curiosities of Literature of Isaac Disraeli," edited by his Son. I. Introduction, xx.— xxii, Fourteenth edition, 1849.

so, as a rule, did Lord Beaconsfield himself in his earlier years. And, finally, we have no mention here of a third variety of the name. We hear nothing-either in connection with the remarkable name itself, or in the catalogue of the family's grand relations-of a Mr. Benjamin Disraell, who, in the earlier part of this century, carried on business as a money-lender in the city of Dublin. This omission is the more strange if it be true that Mr. Benjamin Disraell, of Dublin, was the uncle of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield.

Up to the publication of Mr. Picciotto's interesting book, to which I have already referred, the connection of Isaac D'Israeli with the Jewish faith was generally supposed to have been slight and brief, and certainly to have closed before the birth of his son. Mr. Picciotto has thrown, however, quite a different light upon this subject. It is true that Isaac D'Israeli, though he was for years a regular subscriber to the synagogue, 1 was never a regular attendant at its services, inherited religious indifference on both sides, 2 and abandoned all communion with the faith on very small cause. But he remained in avowed communion with the creed till 1817, and did not completely break from it until 1821.

As a consequence, Lord Beaconsfield was brought up during his earlier years in the Jewish faith; and he and his brothers were "all initiated into the covenant of Abraham." Mr. Picciotto even gives the name of the person who performed the "initiatory rite." 3

Lord Beaconsfield, however, did not long remain a member of his ancestral faith; but the circumstances of his entrance into the Christian Church are not clearly known. According to one story, Mr. Rogers was the author of the great work of regeneration. The tale goes that the poet, who was an intimate friend of Isaac D'Israeli, took a fancy to the bookworm's bright young child; and, anxious that religion should not be a bar to his success in life, asked whether he had been baptized. Finding that, though twelve years of age, the young hopeful was still outside the pale of the Church, the pious poet brought him off to the nearest church, and had him baptized. This tale ought certainly to be true; it would fit in dramatically with the rest of Mr. Disraeli's career. Fancy the champion-inchief of our Established Church owing his Christianity to the whim of a man unconnected with him in blood-and the whim of such a man! Heine says one ought to be very particular as to what grandfather he chooses; perhaps one ought to be even more particular in his choice of a godfather. It was certainly rather ominous to have as one's sponsor a man declared by the experienced Luttrell to be the greatest sensualist he had ever known. 4

According to the other account, Lord Beaconsfield owes his admission to the Christian Church to a Mrs. Ellis, the wife of a literary man well known some years

1 Picciotto, p. 296.

2 Ibid., p. 295; and Lord Beaconsfield gives similar testimony. His grandfather, he says (Curiosities of Literature, I. Int., xxiii.), "appears never to have cordially or intimately mixed with his community." And as to his grandmother, he writes: "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 recognised not in the ignorant malevolence of the powerful, but in the conscientious conviction of the innocent sufferer." He adds that she was "so mortified by his social position, that she lived until eighty without indulging in a tender expression." (Ibid. xxv.)

"It may be interesting," writes Mr. Picciotto, "to our Jewish readers to learn that the gentleman who performed the initiatory rite on the present Premier of England was a relative of his mother, the late David Abarbenel Lindo, an influential member of the Spanish and Portugese Congregation, and a merchant of high commercial standing." (Note, p. 300.. 4 "Luttrell was talking of Moore and Rogers-the poetry of the former so licentious, that of the latter so pure; much of its popularity owing to its being so carefully weeded of everything approaching to indelicacy: and the contrast between the lives and the works of the two men the former a pattern of conjugal and domestic regularity, the latter of all the men he had ever known the greatest sensualist.-Greville's Memoirs, iii 324. Fourth edition.

ago. She, it is said, took advantage of old D'Israeli's absence, and had the son baptized.

However, whatever doubt there may exist as to Mr. Disraeli's sponsors, there is no doubt that he was baptized, and that the ceremony took place in St. Andrew's, Holborn.

This point, long in dispute, was settled by "Sylvanus Urban," of the Gentleman's Magazine, who, in the December number of 1875, gives the form on the page opposite as a copy from the Register of Baptisms.

We have glimpses in Lord Beaconsfield's own words of the manner of his life in his youth. His father is generally supposed to have stood for one of the figures in "Vivian Grey," and the description there given of him represents a man at ease in his circumstances, devoted to study, and but slightly attentive to the every-day cares of life. His son was probably allowed pretty much his own way; and was not so much reared, as allowed to grow. It is, perhaps, characteristic of the father's easy way of taking his child's destiny that he did not send him to Eton, or to any other of the fashionable schools. Indeed, the places where Lord Beaconsfield was educated are so obscure that there is some difficulty in finding out which they were. I believe he spent some portion of his boyhood in a boarding-school at Winchester; not in the great school of the town, but in a private establishment there. He is also said to have attended a school taught by a Unitarian clergyman at Walthamstow; and in an essay in the Edinburgh Review, by Mr. A. Hayward, Q. C., I find it stated that he received part of his education in Hampshire.

Whatever he does know, however, Lord Beaconsfield probably owes principally to himself. We can quite fancy that one of his dreamy and imaginative nature took a strong delight in poring over the quaint volumes with which the library of the author of the Curiosities of Literature" was filled. The history of his own people, it is evident, was one of the subjects of which he was passionately fond; for we find traces in several of his works particularly in his early ones-of considerable acquaintance with the story of the Jewish people. The thoughts which, in these hours of boyish study, were suggested of the contrast between the sublime Hebrew past and the mean Hebrew present, had their share in firing the boy's imagination, in stirring his ambition, perhaps, also, in hardening his heart.

One great advantage Lord Beaconsfield reaped from the position of his father: he obtained through it the entrée into goodLondon society. Self-confident, readytongued, and handsome, he evidently made the most of this advantage; and we find him at a very early age a prominent figure at one of the most prominent salons of London in that day.

While Mr. Disraeli was a youth, the Countess of Blessington and the Count d'Orsay were still in the prime of life and the heydey of fortune. The manner of life which the Countess led has been so often described, that I may dismiss the subject in a few words. Her ladyship, it is known, was the daughter of a drunken, brutal, and impecunious Irish squire, and spent her earlier days in a small town in Ireland. Conscious at the same time of extremely brilliant talents and brilliant beauty, she must have felt with terrible bitterness the squalor of her early surroundings, and have learned to prize with fierce earnestness the advantages of wealth. Then, she received from childhood the bad training of those who have to hide from the outside world the misery of their circumstances. And, in addition, she was allowed unrestrained liberty, and made ample use of the indulgence by audacious flirtations with the garrison officers. Her girlhood was the fittest training for an after-life of female Bohemianism. Nor was her womanhood passed in circumstances more favourable. She was married before she was sixteen to a Captain Farmer, who was, or became, a wild or insane drunkard. Separated from him, she passed some years as the companion of a former admirer. Captain Farmer died in 1817; four months after his death, his widow was married to the Earl of Blessington. The death of the Earl of Blessington in 1829 again left her a widow.

With the Countess of Blessington lived Count d'Orsay. As he, too, has often

PARISH OF ST. ANDREW, HOLBORN.

IN THE CITY OF LONDON AND IN THE COUNTY OF MIDDLESEX.

been described, I may dismiss him with a few words. He had, it is well known, been married to the daughter of the Earl, and the step-daughter of the Countess of Blessington. The match, for some reason or other, proved unhappy. The Count, his wife, and the Countess of Blessington had at one time lived all three together, but after two years of this life the young Countess took leave of her husband and her step-mother, and from that time till their death, in various places and amid various fortunes, Count d'Orsay and the Countess of Blessington lived together. They were perfectly suited the one to the other, and evidently were deeply attached. But as to whether their relations were immoral, as they were equivocal, society had then, as now, strong suspicions, yet no absolute certainty. It is, however, but just to say that, in his last days, when the heavy hand of illness had already fallen on him, and the heavier hand of death was very near, and when already the Countess was dead, Count d'Orsay solemnly declared that he had never borne any love towards her but that of a son to a mother.

The Count was blessed by nature with a fine face and a splendid figure, and, as is known, was, amid all the dandies of his time, the acknowledged leader of fashion, dictating with equal omnipotence the code of a ballroom and the shape of a hat. Nature, besides, had bestowed on him the still greater blessing of perfect health, and accordingly he was cheerful amid multitudinous embarrassments, and was never afflicted by that weariness of spirit which so often afflicts the favourites of fortune. He was, besides, the paragon of politeness, had artistic ability of a high order, and those who knew him best (Lord Beaconsfield among the rest 1) declare that, besides those showy talents, he had a keen and solid intellect.

The company that Mr Disraeli met at the Countess of Blessington's was of a motley character. The future Emperor of the French, then plain Prince Louis Napoleon, was often there-taciturn, abstracted, and, according to the appearance of the times, a dreamer of wild dreams. And with him came, too, M. de Morny, engaged as yet in composing light love poems, occasionally strumming the guitar, and giving to but few, and perhaps not even to himself, any indication of the will of iron and the heart of steel that could plot the strangulation of a republic, the quick assassination of hundreds in the streets, and the slow murder of thousands in the pontoons.

There, too, probably Mr. Disreali occasionally heard Theodore Hook's goodnatured, and Horace Smith's pointed, wit, Tom Moore's melodies, and the evil stories of Rogers; and it may have been in this debateable ground that he first laid the foundations of that friendship with Lord Lyndhurst, which was to so greatly help and so deeply influence his career.

It will be seen that, however varied the nationality, the pursuit, and the character of the people who met at the Countess of Blessington's, there was yet a certain similarity-a sort of family likeness-between several of them. The equivocal character of the house was reflected in the equivocal character of the guests.

Many of the guests, like the host, were gamblers with fortune: great in hope and deep in debt, rich in talents and energy, but with a career spoiled or not yet come, and ever expecting the morrow that would bring sublime fortune, or abysmal ruin.

We see, then, the double influences to which the young Disraeli was subjected. On the one hand, there was the literary quiet of his home; on the other, the bustle of a society in which he moved among the active and the great of the earth. His surroundings at once suggested literary effort and political ambition. The nature, too, which was exposed to these different sets of circumstances, was, like that of most men, a very mixed one. On one side of his character dreamy, imaginative, and abstracted, young Disraeli was on the other active, practical, and observant. And now we proceed to describe the fruits which this variety of circumstances and this mixture of character produced.

But before I proceed to the description of the young Disraeli's mental char

1 "Lothair," General Preface, xviii.