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If the Nazarene was God, his crucifixion involves a complicated arrangement for murder; the Jews who demanded his death were divinely instigated, and Judas Iscariot was pre-ordained to betray his master; in which case his treachery was a necessary element of the drama, entitling him not to vituperation but to gratitude, even perhaps to the monument which Benjamin Disraeli suggested as his proper reward.

SOME one has said that if any man would faithfully write his autobiography, giving truly his own history and experiences, the ills and joys, the haps and mishaps that had fallen to his lot, he could not fail to make an interesting story; and Disraeli makes Sidonia say that there is romance in every life.

Her letters were interesting and Disraeli's letters to her, now published, reveal the history of his daily life as he never told it to another. At her death the bulk of Mrs. Willyum's fortune went by will to Disraeli. But Mrs. Disraeli was not jealous of this affection. Why should a woman of sixty be jealous of another woman the same age?

That he was by no means gagged by personal feeling or seduced in matters of policy is evident from the above-quoted letter to the Times; but he liked Disraeli better than he did his great rival; the one may have bewildered his followers, the other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself the lie, in Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to borrow an epigram, "he made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice."

Galileo with his 'E pur si muove, Disraeli with his 'The time will come, wore such a mien as yours, as we turned from that well-foughten field. Yes! and you loved to take in earnest vague Hanoverian threats of possible arrest for your baby-treason, and, for some time, I know, you never passed a policeman without a dignified tremor, as of one who might at any moment find a lodging in the Tower.

The vogue of the Opera was passing. Even in the top of the season, Rotten Row, I read, was not impenetrably crowded. But in 1880 came the tragic fall of Disraeli and the triumph of the Whigs. How great a change came then upon Westminster must be known to any one who has studied the annals of Gladstones incomparable Parliament.

"In the year 1864," says Froude, "Disraeli happened to be on a visit at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the chair.

Austen, mature in years, with a decade of London "seasons" behind her, having met every possible kind of man Europe had to offer, discovered that the world did not know Ben Disraeli at all. She saw that the youth did not reveal his true self, and that instead of courting society for its own sake he had a supreme contempt for it.

Disraeli induced the House to surrender altogether its privilege of judging of elections, and to submit the investigations of petitions on such subjects to the only tribunal sufficiently above suspicion to command and retain the confidence of the nation, the judges of the high courts of law.

If, however, his maiden speech is a failure, "farewell, a long farewell" to all his political aspirations. Few men have risen from such a fall. Now and then, as in the well-known instances of Sheridan, Disraeli, and some less prominent names, real genius, aided by dogged determination, has forced its way upward in spite of early ill-success; but such cases are very rare.