his announcement at the dinner-table at Windsor, with reference to some disputed point of regal genealogy, “We are in the presence of probably the only Person in Europe who could tell us”?  In the last year of his life he said to Mr. Matthew Arnold, in a strange burst of confidence which showed how completely he realized that his fall from power was final, “You have heard me accused of being a flatterer.  It is true.  I am a flatterer.  I have found it useful.  Every one likes flattery:  and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”  In this business Lord Beaconsfield excelled.  Once, sitting at dinner by the Princess of Wales, he was trying to cut a hard dinner-roll.  The knife slipped and cut his finger, which the Princess, with her natural grace, instantly wrapped up in her handkerchief.  The old gentleman gave a dramatic groan, and exclaimed, “When I asked for bread they gave me a stone; but I had a Princess to bind my wounds.”

The atmosphere of a Court naturally suited him, and he had a quaint trick of transferring the grandiose nomenclature of palaces to his own very modest domain of Hughenden.  He called his simple drawing-room the Saloon; he styled his pond the Lake; he expatiated on the beauties of the terrace walks, and the “Golden Gate,” and the “German Forest.”  His style of entertaining was more showy than comfortable.  Nothing could excel the grandeur of his state coach and powdered footmen; but when the ice at dessert came up melting, one of his friends exclaimed, “At last, my dear Dizzy, we have got something hot;” and in the days when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer some critical guest remarked of the soup that it was apparently made with Deferred Stock.  When Lady Beaconsfield died he sent for his agent and said, “I desire that her Ladyship’s remains should be borne to the grave by the tenants of the estate.”  Presently the agent came back with a troubled countenance and said, “I regret to say there are not tenants enough to carry a coffin.”

Lord Beaconsfield’s last years were tormented by a bronchial asthma of gouty origin, against which he fought with tenacious and uncomplaining courage.  The last six weeks of his life, described all too graphically by Dr. Kidd in an article in the Nineteenth Century, were a hand-to-hand struggle with death.  Every day the end was expected, and his compatriot, companion, and so-called friend, Bernal Osborne, found it in his heart to remark, “Ah, overdoing it—­as he always overdid everything.”

For my own part, I never was numbered among Lord Beaconsfield’s friends, and I regarded the Imperialistic and pro-Turkish policy of his latter days with an equal measure of indignation and contempt.  But I place his political novels among the masterpieces of Victorian literature, and I have a sneaking affection for the man who wrote the following passage:  “We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous.  We must prepare for the coming hour.  The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions, and the Youth of a Nation are the Trustees of Posterity.”