His attitude was as towards one bound up with the fortunes of the country, and therefore debarred from indulging her own tastes and prejudices. Think of the scrape you'd get us all into,' was the final argument with which he overcame her refusal to be vaccinated. The pressure he put upon her to attend church in a public manner on the eve of her marriage was in the circumstances a trifle inconsiderate, but he justified it on the ground that 'it's of great importance that you should get over your dislike of going amongst everybody.' In the same way she was to get over her dislike of Sir Robert Peel. 'You must not give way to personal dislikes too much,' nor to partisanship and the political bitterness which sees only bad motives in opponents; I don't like you to have those feelings.' 'I don't see much difference. . . . I think they are very much like the others,' he said, urging her to invite the great people on the Tory side. Such counsels must have come convincingly from a politician who could tell a colleague that, in his view, the great fault of the present time was that men hated each other so damnably; for my part I love them all.' However little at that time the Queen was able to acquire it herself, there is no doubt that this rather unusual political temper deeply impressed her; 'a truly angelic disposition and worthy of eternal record,' is the comment following upon a conversation in which Melbourne had spoken generously of Brougham.

...

Popularity, Melbourne taught the Queen, was very well if you did not make too much of it; but, Whig and aristocrat though he was, he laid great stress upon public feeling and the general conviction. It was an essential part of his political creed and sprang from the instinctive respect for individual rights in every class which made him jealous for the liberties of the poor and inspired those retorts to philanthropists, ' if you'd only have the goodness to leave them alone,' which the Queen noted down with so much amusement.

The lessons which the young Sovereign found most hard to learn were probably those in connexion with the laws and customs of her country. The illustration afforded by her conflict with Ministers in the summer of 1839 is notorious, and perhaps its importance has been exaggerated. Melbourne characteristically blamed him

self for the results of action which at the time he does not appear to have discouraged, but latest authority finds the Tories in the wrong rather than the Queen. She proved at least that she did not suffer from the disability to say 'No'; which is, said Melbourne, ‘a very bad thing for a public man.' In her well-known subsequent reference to this affair the Queen did not say that, were it to be done again, she would have acted differently, but that she might have done so; and only the constitutional prig will wish that she had. The altercations in Parliament over Prince Albert's provision called forth something of the same imperious desire for power in its substance; and her interviews with Lord Melbourne show much 'pertinacity' on one side and some gentle reminders on the other. These are our laws '-he does not know that they are right, but there they are, and convenient at times. Even in social matters, 'in this country all should go by law and precedent'; otherwise a person is liable to make every sort of mistake.

Law and precedent and the feeling of the people'whether the country is up to it. . . whether the feeling of the country is such'-these were the constitutional props he set up on either side of her. How much of his teaching was realised or deliberately adopted by the Queen, it is impossible to tell from her Journal. She made no summary or analysis of what she had learned from him; she stated simply that she owed him more than she could ever repay. The extent of her debt must be measured by the character of her reign. It was not for nothing that the ruler who became so identified with the life of the nation that the words Queen and Country ceased to have a separate significance, learned her first lesson in government from that one of her Ministers who, if not the greatest, was the most English of them all. A true public servant' she was called, after her death, by another great Englishman; and one may suppose that this was the title which Queen Victoria, in the height of her power, would have carried with most pride, and that Melbourne would most have desired for her.

ELEANOR CECIL.

PENGE PUBLIC LIBRARY.

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Art. 10.-DISRAELI: THE FIRST TWO PHASES.

The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. By W. F. Monypenny. Vols I, II. London: Murray, 1910, 1912.

'WE may as well finish Cæsar's story because we never know until a man's end whether the play has been tragedy or comedy.' So writes Lord Morley, provoked by the consideration of Cæsar Borgia's career to a reflection which might nearly as well be suggested by that of his greater but scarcely more familiar namesake. Pascal, looking not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen, has, indeed, struck a deeper truth: 'Le dernier acte est toujours sanglant.' But if we make a background of the flaming ramparts of the world, each human life, in spite of some by-play and cross division, can doubtless be brought at last under one or other of the two accepted categories. We watch the rich humours and large ironies of terrestrial drama, wondering whether the close of the piece will make for laughter or tears. The very limitations of the actors only enhance the piquancy of the performance. They are as ignorant as ourselves of what is in store for them. In their perplexity they sometimes come to draw their words from temperament and their gestures from habit, and are themselves the sport of circumstance. The most solemn plausibilities ultimately disclose the finest comedy; tragedy, complete and overwhelming, is found to be the real tenour of a life that had seemed wreathed in smiles and crowned with roses. We cannot tell until the end.

Even then we cannot always be sure, for there are cryptic cases where a man's character and intention are left hanging in dispute. Shall we, for example, ever quite know our own minds about Disraeli ? Will the end of the biography resolve the vital issues that obtrude themselves from the first? The question whether it was tragedy or comedy turns, at least to a considerable extent, upon his attitude towards human things. No mind ever moved more swiftly from the sublime to the ridiculous; did his vast ambition ever outstrip the keen pursuit of his subtle, relentless irony? What are we to say of his work? Was he a great constructive statesman, filled

with prophetic vision and descending heaven-sent at the crisis of an empire's growth to point the path of destiny? Or was he just a charlatan, a mocking mountebank masquerading in the guise of better men, ridiculing their fidelities, confusing their convictions, believing, like Gay, that life was a jest and that all things showed it? Were all his high-flown sentiments the treacherous homages of a profound cynicism, or was his sardonic mirth merely the mask of an idealist whose true feelings could find no proper nourishment in a fallen world? Was he totally devoid-as his language so often makes us fancy-of any true perception of righteousness and judgment, of those high moralities which his own race has done so much to implant in the world? Or was the question which he asked about mankind in general particular to himself, and was he, in spite of much appearance to the contrary, really on the side of the angels?

Whichever way we choose to have it, the dramatic opportunities, tragic and comic, psychological and historical and social, are abundant and absorbing. No biography that the 19th century has to offer-not Talleyrand's, nor the third Napoleon's, nor yet Newman's-has finer and more fascinating points of interest than his. Mr Monypenny has put it to the severest of all tests-the test of broken production-and it has gone out and prospered. No ordinary drama could sustain an interval of two years between each act. Where the life of man is in play, it is of the essence of good art that the story should move from start to finish with no longer breaks than are required for reflection. History, doubtless, has no natural boundaries; the life of nations flows on from age to age, calling for artifice to break the stream with banks and locks. But biography is fenced and walled by God; and each man's life flits without a pause across the lighted hall from one dark eternity into the next.

If Disraeli's career is a battle-ground for Thalia and Melpomene, that of his biographer is no disputed possession. Here is tragedy, not indeed unrelieved, for much has been done, and well done, yet none the ss in a sense consummate and irreparable. There are no tragedies like those of art and letters. The statesman, struck down in the prime of life or the crisis of his country's Vol. 218.-No. 434.

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fortunes, will presently find a successor; for the face of the world changes with ineffable swiftness, and the abilities and policy that seemed indispensable one day are displaced and out of date the next. The soldier, falling nobly, like Wolfe, in the hour of victory or, like Gordon, in the hour of defeat, forgoes his work only to win an exceeding weight of glory and to fortify his race with an example that exalts and stimulates thousands to whom his talent would of itself have been no title to memory. Even the man of science cut off on the eve of discovery leaves his labours in the sure and certain hope that sooner or later the hidden things of Nature will be made manifest. But the artist enjoys no such consolations. For him the sword of Damocles has a keener edge. His world is within himself and perishes with him. His thoughts are incommunicable except in the one and perfect form. Another hand may colour his drawing or complete his book. But no mind but his own can reproduce the close sequence of impressions which have grown, like leaves and flowers, upon the stem and outline of the work, to find their perfect development in the character and conclusion of the whole. And with these are lost the long concentration of the mind upon its goal, the growing passion and intensity of pursuit, the patient exploration of remote yet cognate country. Only the faith that can remove mountains is entirely equal to such emergencies. Pitt's dying lament has not a more poignant pathos than the cry which Buckle was heard muttering upon his death-bed: My book! my book! I shall never finish my book!'

The life of Disraeli, however well it may be completed, can hardly be more than two disconnected fragments, the junction of two concepts, of two styles, and of two methods. To judge work steadily one must see it whole. Yet, unfinished as it is, Mr Monypenny's achievement is notable enough. No biographer could have been more judicious or have executed his task in a more pleasing or workmanlike fashion, with greater modesty or readier resource. If the book would never have taken rank among the greater biographies in the language, it is mainly because the author had no opportunity of knowing his subject at first hand. A biography to be perfect must be the work of an intimate friend. Boswell