The Sun.
London, England, 1852-06-07 00:00:00

this, moreover, by setting class against class, he ac•
complished his purp eie more effectually by imparting
simultaneously to the poor and the rich a better ap •
preciation of each other—revealing the pure in the
midst of the sordid and the heart under the ermine,
Returned to the House of Commons, at the general
election of 1847, as knight of the shire for Bucking-
ham, Disraeli, in the same year, published his novel
of Tancred, otherwise called " The New Crusade," a
work expressing some of his most cherished views
upon religion and some of the loftiest among his po-
litical aspirations. Incongruous though its materiels
were, and though they were in some measure con-
nected somewhat inartistically, the work nevertheless
commanded attention by its singularity, while it won
respect by its enthusiasm. Beginning with the
" chefs de cuisine" of Mayfair, with Papa Prevost and
his Pupilt Leander, the story wanders off to such
g
mighty and puissant personages as George the Duke
pajeordsnlz i, 40thfariiie, the Duchess of Bellamont, in the
• 1,!:,s ose only son is discovered the hero
Tancred, Marquess of Mentacute. Thereupon, rov-
'ng into the high circles, where we are again intro-
duced to several of our' favourites in " Sybil" and
" Coniogshy," the thread T the narrative strays off
departure
formo among
Palestine,
into-the remoteness of-the °A
Asiatic ild . Con-
spicuoust he
transmuted into a sarcasoaTtnrcaics
finyllteiashardraae.
76tdf,laacsotocwhifewtahsyt'Eo'
kdcshe.ael :Ten: I:::,bs,Sbetld'rboearesneccgorotimnbl Edith—strangely
in a sentence and
phrase." In the
employment of this two-fold capacity a
author himself prove: personify
proficient. as satirist, the
more than ever
Valentine, for example, he depicts4,wan her after aeftferLtandiys
and
once been
amusing fashion, as a personage
a beauty, with the reputation of a wit,
up for behag a wit on the reputation of havinghhbewenseat
beauty;" while of Lady Hampshire heoontents him-
self with remarking that she " spoke in a sawne y
voice of factitious enthusiasm." As a couple
of titled "parvenus," Lord and Lady Mount-
joy are in like manner branded as persons
" who, with a large fortune, lived in a
wrong square, and asked to their house everybody,
who was nobody." Colonel Brace is humorously de-
lineated as " robust, a little portly, but, well-buckled,
still presenting a grand military figure," while the
clever and beautiful Lady Constance Rawleigh, who is
said to have "guanoed her mind with French novels," is
described as having possessed the reputation of
" breathing scorpions as well as brilliants and roses."
Even Hillel Besso, although an Asiatic, and, what is
more, a Caucasian, does not escape the accusation of
" uttering common-places, as if they were poignant
originalities." It is in the more serious portions of
the romance, however, that its principal attraction is
discoverable, where the writer illustrates anew with
an impassioned and persuasive rhetoric hie sympathies
for that sacred and ancient race of whose descendants
he had already mournfully asserted that they had too
long " laboured under the odium and stigma of me-
dieeval malevolence." His veneration for the
memory of his forefathers may surely be compre-
hended by those who, like the Gentile nations
of Christendom, are indebted to the Hebrew
prophets for the light, and the music, and
the poetry of so many august revelations. Remind-
ing his readers how profoundly they are under obli-
gations to the children of the Chaldean Abraham,
the author, himself a descendant of the Sephardim,
conducts his hero to the tomb where the Prince of the
house of David has for eighteen centuries been adored
by pilgrims from the remotest quarters of the earth,
in Jerusalem. Tancred adventures upon his "new
crusade," impelled by a sense of those lofty Asian
principles which Disraeli had already designated as
"of divine origin and of universal and eternal ap-
plication." His exploits carry him not only into the
desert but into Damascus, bringing him into contact
with the Druse, and the Bedoueen, and the Maronite,
besides conducting him to the mountain palaces of the
Lebanon, and at last even as far as the secluded
cities of the Ansayrii. By a singular coincidence,
almost immediately after the appearance of " Tan-
crecli" a young officer in the British Navy, the Hon.
Frederick Walpole, penetrated for the first time those
regions which had been hitherto inexorably closed
against an European. Describing the Ansayrii
principally, therefore, if not altogether, from
conjecture, the novelist acquitted himself
of the task with sagacity. Sometimes, however, his
guesses at the reality have proved, of course, erro-
neous ; as, for instance, in reference to the theology
of the Syrian Chinese. The worship of the Ansayrii
appears unhappily to be somewhat more obscene than
that which would have induced them to adore, ac-
cording to the graceful supposition of Disraeli, the
beautiful and majestic divinities of Olympus.
As an episode to the main story, the his-
tory of the Family of Baroni is eminently
ingenious, developirig at once the idea of Sidonia's
character and of the importance of the Hebrew race—
ubiquitous in spite of persecution, and flourishing al-
though expatriated—that venerable race, out of which
grew originally, like the leaves, and the flowers, and
the fruit of a tree, the virtues, and the precepts, and
the beneficence of Christianity.

" Nalla eilva talem profErt
Fronde, flute, germine I"

Principally because of its earnest advocacy of the
race of his progenitors, " Tancred" may be said to
have confirmed rather than extended its author's
reputation. Its abrupt conclusion destroyed the interest
it might otherwise have retained; insomuch that, in
spite of their beauty, little is cared, on closing the last
volume, for either va or Astarte, the destinies of the
heroines being left altogether in a state of indecision.
In 1849 a Life of Isaac Disraeli appeared as an in-
troductory chapter to his delightful " Curiosities of
Literature." Although of course necessarily brief,
restricted, indeed, within the compass of a moderate
pamphlet (pp. 63), it constitutes one of the most
charming of all our author's compositions. As
a tribute to the memory of a father, declared to have
been without" a single passion or prejudice," it se-
cures a respect which, before the concluding passages
are read, has become heightened into admiration.
At the commencement of this literary biography, the
memorialist has written, among others, two golden
sentences, true in significance and beautiful in ex-
pression—" The pen is a weapon as puissant
as the sword "_" A book may be as
great a thing as a battle"—reminding us
that the life of Sholtspere, for example, would
not be less interesting or less valuable than that of
Alexander. After recounting how his father, before
the age of fifteen, had dipped in Bayle and Voltaire,
remaining for an interval at Amsterdam, under a
tu.or, who was " a great impostor," the biographer
records the return of Isaac Disraeli to England, when
eighteen—a disciple of Rousseau. Here, moreover,
is mentioned that touching incident so simply and
yet so exquisitely told, of the poem submitted to
the judgme.it of Dr. Johnson by the future author
of the " Curiosities of Literature." It occurred after
his return in 1788 from his travels in France—
when he left the manuscript himself, at Bolt-court,
in the hands of Mr, Francis Barber, the Doctor's
black servant, and on calling a week later for the
reply, had the packet returned unopened. Isaac
Disraeli was informed that the Doctor was too ill
to read any communication. Ile paned out into Fleet-
street, anxious and doubtful. "Alas !" exclaims 1
his son in recounting the circumstance, " the cause
was too true ; and a few weeks after, on
that bed beside which the voice of Mr. Burke fal-
tered,f
nquitted Langton
,a
se nvearvdigitlhaent,tethnedegrreat spiritso o
soul
of f Johnson
earth." By this graceful memorial of Disraeli the
Elder, Disraeli the Younger proved himself emi-
nently qualified in a literary sense, to produce in 1851
his latest work, entitled Lord George Bentinck: a
political biography. During several years previously
he had qualified himself, in other respects, to compile
a volume consisting chiefly of the record of events in
which he himself bad prominently participated. Aosup-
porter of Sir Robert Peel's Government for some time,
he ultimately withdrew from the encour,aageomregnataiozfe-ad
Cabinet which he boldly reprobated 114 "an n
hypocrisy." It was not so much the policy com-
menced in 1842 which estranged him from those who
still owned allegiance to that illustrious statesman, as
it was the very method, according to which, in 1834,
by his celebrated Tamworth Manifesto, Sir Robert
may be said to have created the system of
it
Conser-
vatism. Alluding to that document, Disraeli
observed in Coningsby (Book 11., c. 5) that
" an attempt to construct a partywithoutprincipwleass;
administrativeb
.
its basis, therefore, was necessarily Latitudina-
rianism bee
and d
elitist y
.”Instead of
inevitable consequence
aan
b
Political
; Infiexperiment like that, he deelared
be enamoured with the Toryism "breathed in
the intrepid eloquence andier patriot himself
fl
to
William Wyndham," the
believed to be " vindicated 37i
ll ism
which he
golden sen-
tences" by the "fervent argutnenta and ;
logic " of Bolingbroke. Smitten with laorrivepafossriotaheids
ibdee:blyoftbheisvpeorlyitisceaolsedaoyf
-dreams, incited it may
his enterprize, the Member for brilliancy:Buek
Buckingham
am daring o
oalo!
mencA in 1844 those memorable attacks upon the
Prime lSlinister which eventually led to his retirement
from the administration.
attack F, in which every For the acerbity of these
since the death of his great antagonist
sentence had the point of
tar!
epigram, Disraeli has magnanimously
t
tribute to his genius, expressed
Yet—as
, . in the language of ad-
miration.
yc oarngpeenuesra4os
Wilmot says in the Comedy—
"'Gad, if I were a i statesman ' I'd rather, instead,
Nave the epitaph living—the' epigram dead."
Howbeit, those passages in the political biography of
Lord George Bentinck in which the character of Sir
Robert Peel is discriminated, are scarcely less ad-
mirable than the portions of the same work relating
to the gallant -hearted and chivalrous leader of the
Protectionists. If there is one peculiarity, however,
more
conspicuous than another in the tempera-
ment of the present Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer) it is that
p of a magnanimous ap-
preciation
of his Parliamentary antagonists.