Disraeli: A Study in Personality and Ideas

I wish to head this chapter by a most striking passage hitherto unquoted. It occurs in the fourth of Disraeli’s Letters to the Whigs, published in the first numbers of _The Pres...

Before Disraeli had entered public life, at a time when public opinion remained stagnant regarding the reciprocal needs and splendid future of the Mother Country and her childre...

The secrets of success, Disraeli has told us more than once, are knowledge of your capacities, constancy of purpose, and mastery of your subject. It is seldom that in one brain...

“The equality of man,” exclaims Disraeli in _Tancred_, “can only be accomplished by the sovereignty of God. The longing for fraternity can never be satisfied but under the sway...

In _Vivian Grey_, Disraeli mocks at the attitude of the early political economists towards Labour in the person of “Mr. Toad,” who defined it as “that exertion of mind or body w...

“A great mind that thinks and feels is never inconsistent and never insincere.... Insincerity is the vice of a fool, and inconsistency the blunder of a knave.... Let us not forg...

Whatever Disraeli wrote was always literature, and never lecture. He was a born man of letters, and Dickens once lamented that politics had so long and often deprived fiction of...

I have associated these two heads of discussion because they have long been coupled in home politics, at times disastrously, but now, it may be hoped, under favouring auspices....

Macaulay observes of Frances Burney that “while still a girl she had laid up such a store of materials for fiction as few of those who mix much in the world are able to accumula...

The power of imagination is essential to supreme statesmanship. Indeed, no really originative genius in any domain of the mind can succeed without it. In literature it reigns pa...

“To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a _real throne_,” Disraeli ranks, with his ideal mission towards the Church, as “the trainer of the nation;” towa...