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It became evident that the entire place must be raised, and at once, to the level of those peacocks. An ornamental piazza was added, all the paths were broadened and graveled, and even terraces were dreamed of, as I recalled the terraces where Lord Beaconsfield's peacocks used to sun themselves and display their beauties Queen Victoria now has a screen made of their feathers.
In the second volume of Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion will be found a description, by a hand which was never excelled at such business, of that grotesque revival of medievalism, the Tournament at Eglinton Castle in 1839. But the writer, conceding something to the requirements of art, ignores the fact that the splendid pageant was spoilt by rain.
Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a generation weary of the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, meriting Beaconsfield's epithet. The work had the fortune which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved for their own it was read in the boudoir as much as in the study. Nor did its power diminish.
Whether he had the tact and temperate spirit that must form the basis of these qualities in the production of serious fiction is less certain, if he may be judged by the tone of such minor pieces as Civilization without Delusion, Beaconsfield's Novels, and Democratic Snobbery.
He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression flung out into every burst." This is a contemporary description of Lord Beaconsfield's conversation in those distant days when, as a young man about town, he was talking and dressing his way into social fame.
From that time 1872 Gladstone's popularity rapidly declined, till it revived, after an interval of Lord Beaconsfield's rule, at the General Election of 1880.
One bit of work I did for the "Herald" which I remember with much pleasure. It was the reporting of Beaconsfield's Aylesbury speech, not a stenographic report, for that they had from the English press, but a letter on the occasion as a demonstration.
Sir John Macdonald never received this letter. It was written in South Africa in May, and Sir John died on June 6. Sir John Macdonald's resemblance to Lord Beaconsfield has often been remarked. That it must have been striking is evident from Sir Charles Dilke's comment: The first time I saw Sir John Macdonald was shortly after Lord Beaconsfield's death and as the clock struck midnight.
For a brilliant sketch of his social aspect we may consult Lord Beaumaris in Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion; and of what he was in Parliament we have the same great man's account, reported by Matthew Arnold: "Full of nerve, dash, fire, and resource, he carried the House irresistibly along with him."
His previous action in resigning the Secretaryship of the Colonies in Lord Derby's third administration, owing to a difference of opinion on parliamentary reform, and his subsequent resignation because he disapproved of Lord Beaconsfield's Eastern action in 1878, showed him to be a man of marked and fearless opinions.
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