nickname. As if there could be any opinion but that of the Sovereign and the two Houses of Parliament."
Now turn from this stiff Zenobian orthodoxy of Toryism to Disraeli himself as he exhibits, in private letters of 1862-3 addressed to Mrs. Willyams, his instinctive, spontaneous response of delight to the play of revolutionary power:
It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered, like a fairy tale, and the most powerful people in the world, male and female, a few years back, were adventurers, exiles, and demireps. Vive la bagatelle. . . . The Greeks really want to make my friend Lord Stanley their king. This beats any novel. I think he ought to take the crown, but he will not. Had I his youth, I would not hesitate, even with the earldom of Derby in the distance.
Mr. Disraeli, commoner, glows, at the age of fifty-eight, at thought of a great adventure which fails to stir his young friend, the noble lord. It is an outflashing of the never quenched Napoleonic passion of his youth. It is an expression of a pure personal impulse to rule, with a sense that the power is in himself, a sense which is always accompanied by a certain tendency to regard parliamentary procedure impatiently and all the talk of either Whigs or Tories as but "eternal palaver." In his stronger imaginative moods, Disraeli becomes sin-
