to do so, if, in her opinion, “your Majesty’s Government have from wilfulness, or even from weakness, deceived your Majesty.”  To the horror of Mr. Gladstone, he not only kept the Queen informed as to the general course of business in the Cabinet, but revealed to her the part taken in its discussions by individual members of it.  Lord Derby, the son of the late Prime Minister and Disraeli’s Foreign Secretary, viewed these developments with grave mistrust.  “Is there not,” he ventured to write to his Chief, “just a risk of encouraging her in too large ideas of her personal power, and too great indifference to what the public expects?  I only ask; it is for you to judge.”

As for Victoria, she accepted everything—­compliments, flatteries, Elizabethan prerogatives—­without a single qualm.  After the long gloom of her bereavement, after the chill of the Gladstonian discipline, she expanded to the rays of Disraeli’s devotion like a flower in the sun.  The change in her situation was indeed miraculous.  No longer was she obliged to puzzle for hours over the complicated details of business, for now she had only to ask Mr. Disraeli for an explanation, and he would give it her in the most concise, in the most amusing, way.  No longer was she worried by alarming novelties; no longer was she put out at finding herself treated, by a reverential gentleman in high collars, as if she were some embodied precedent, with a recondite knowledge of Greek.  And her deliverer was surely the most fascinating of men.  The strain of charlatanism, which had unconsciously captivated her in Napoleon III, exercised the same enchanting effect in the case of Disraeli.  Like a dram-drinker, whose ordinary life is passed in dull sobriety, her unsophisticated intelligence gulped down his rococo allurements with peculiar zest.  She became intoxicated, entranced.  Believing all that he told her of herself, she completely regained the self-confidence which had been slipping away from her throughout the dark period that followed Albert’s death.  She swelled with a new elation, while he, conjuring up before her wonderful Oriental visions, dazzled her eyes with an imperial grandeur of which she had only dimly dreamed.  Under the compelling influence, her very demeanour altered.  Her short, stout figure, with its folds of black velvet, its muslin streamers, its heavy pearls at the heavy neck, assumed an almost menacing air.  In her countenance, from which the charm of youth had long since vanished, and which had not yet been softened by age, the traces of grief, of disappointment, and of displeasure were still visible, but they were overlaid by looks of arrogance and sharp lines of peremptory hauteur.  Only, when Mr. Disraeli appeared, the expression changed in an instant, and the forbidding visage became charged with smiles.  For him she would do anything.  Yielding to his encouragements, she began to emerge from her seclusion; she appeared in London in semi-state, at hospitals and concerts; she opened Parliament;