in your bosom! He cut up a great minister at his appointed hour with the apparent nonchalance of an epicure dismembering a quail. He studied invective like a fine art. While the victim twitched and paled, he launched his barbed and icy sarcasms with a finely precalculated murderous precision. When he himself was attacked, he sat immobile, impassive, impervious, or with head sunk on bosom, feigning indifference or sleep. He had the gift of making his silence ominous, his repose sphinxlike, sinister. In action, by the sheer thrust and flashing velocity of his edged intellect he dazzled his hearers till slower-witted men gave way before him and fell behind and followed him, as one falls behind a dangerous weapon.
Opportunist to the finger tips, he treated party "principles" as but expedients to be retained or discarded with reference to their utility in getting the government out and himself and his friends in. If a Liberal ministry became warlike and used a "strong hand" in China, he immediately became pacific and humane. But if Gladstone raised a humanitarian cry over Bulgarian atrocities, Disraeli remarked that the worst of the atrocities was Gladstone's pamphlet, and he spoke in Parliament with such playful levity of the massacre of ten or twenty thousand unarmed peasants that he fairly exposed himself to the charge of inhuman callousness. As advocate for the landed interest, he supported, in Opposition, the nefarious Corn Laws. But the very principle of Protection, which he employed with
