æsthetic mummeries, the morris dances, the Christmas revels, and the general reproduction of feudal glories which formed an essential portion of the creed of young England. The young England school, that is to say, was a rebellion or protest-and in many respects a healthy one-against the dominating power conferred upon the moneyed and the middle classes by the Reform Act of 1832. The movement which culminated in the Factory Acts was not in its origin democratic or Liberal, still less Whig. It was distinctly aristocratic and Tory. Therefore Lord Beaconsfield asked, who are the friends of the people, if not the Tories? And, what is the Tory party, if not national? His domestic policy and his view of the functions of Conservatism remained to the last day of his life what they were when he wrote "Sybil" and "Coningsby," stripped of their fanciful trappings and grotesque artificialities. He believed in the generosity as in the enthusiasm of the English people, and he held that it was the business of Conservative statesmen to enlist popular sentiment on their side by remedying popular grievances, and so to convert revolutionary forces into forces making for law and order.

The line which he took in his first great speech in the House of Commons on the Chartist Riots contains the key to all his opinions on the relations between the different classes of which the English polity consists. The Chartists, he maintained, must have grievances. They were worthy of all censure for endeavoring to redress them by force. None the less those grievances demanded close inquiry into the wrongs of the working classes, and prompt reparation. The natural and the best government for a country with the traditions and population of England appeared to Lord Beaconsfield a monarchy and aristocracy, resting upon a theocratic sanction, ever mindful of the wants and in close sympathy with the feelings of the English masses. In this way, and in no other, he believed, would it be practicable to interpose an impassable bar. rier between the inhabitants of the United Kingdom and the selfish aspirations of the Whig oligarchy, ever ready to use the poor as their tools, and therefore consciously or unconsciously to play

into the hands of the revolutionary Radicals.

Such is a fair, though necessarily a very brief account of the ideas in the region both of foreign and domestic affairs with which Lord Beaconsfield started in life, and which, with tenacious and unswerving loyalty, he consistently endeavored to translate into practice. Let us now look at the specific means which in this enterprise he employed. It is perhaps not easy for the most appreciative of the many biographies of Disraeli which have been published, to comprehend the exact difficulties of his position at that remote period when he naively told Lord Melbourne that he wished to be Prime Minister, or of the obstacles raised by social and personal prejudice against him. Of these difficulties his defects were at once the creation and the measure. Placed in circumstances that would have overcome less aspiring and resolute natures, he had to forge the instruments with which to carve his way through them. It was necessary, in a word, for him to suit his weapons to his opponents and the character of the opposition he encountered.

English society, which is now rapidly becoming the most cosmopolitan and tolerant in the world, the most uniformly hospitable to the representatives of all nationalities-Turks, Medes, Elamites, Parthians, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia-was, half a century since, fenced round by an impenetrable barrier of exclusiveness and triple girt with bigotry. Preeminently patrician in its bias, it had not done anything to encourage that levelling-up movement from the middle to the higher classes which has been the great feature in our latterday history. Although the younger Disraeli was the son of a man respected for his learning and his writings, the race to which he belonged excited against him in his first attempt to embark upon a political career an amount of antagonism and bitterness which, in this age of Hebraic omnipotence and popularity, may well seem incredible. The letters of the father of the present Duke of Rutland to the grandfather of the late Lord Strangford, in which the friendship of their two sons with Mr. Disraeli is deplored, faithfully reflect the current feeling of the society of that

epoch on the subject. "Their admirable character," writes his Grace of Belvoir, "only makes them the more assailable by the arts of a designing Jew." Sir Robert Peel, to whom Disraeli first addressed himself, was thoroughly saturated with this irrational antipathy, and it is also tolerably clear that Disraeli's attacks upon Croker are to be explained by the manner in which Mr. Rigby,' anxious not to offend the sensitiveness of his patrons, repulsed the author of "Coningsby." Up to the very last there were some foolish persons of the highest consideration in the fashionable world,who abstained as much as possible from all intercourse with Lord Beacons field, simply in deference to an obsolete and unreasoning prejudice, while a duchess, the wife of a duke who was a member of his own Cabinet, boasted that she had never held any conversation with him in her life. During 1845 and 1846, when Disraeli was preparing Lord George Bentinck for the part he took in the Free Trade struggle, it is the fact that he never enjoyed the social intimacy or regard of the family of his noble pupil.

The man who was thus pitted against forces so subtle and so widely disseminated as those which confronted Disraeli the younger, had no alternative but to succumb if he could not resort to tactics of his own which exactly met the exigencies of the occasion. There were two things that it was incumbent upon Disraeli to do. The first was to make his mark, the second to show that he was a person to be feared and therefore to be conciliated. Forti nihil difficile was the motto which he selected for his escutcheon. He might with equal propriety have added the legend Nemo me impune lacessit. Before he was five-andtwenty he had won his place among the celebrities of the period, and if he had not resolved to utilise literature as a stepping-stone to politics, his path would have been smooth, brilliant and untroubled, What the authorities in the world of statesmanship resented was the ambition of a young man-endowed doubtless with dazzling gifts, but of an alien race, and of a personal appearance which, if picturesque, was also aggressively eccentric, unequipped with any of the usual credentials, undisciplined by

the regular educational ordeal, who had never been at a public school or a university-to win a place and raise his voice in the councils of the nation. It is sometimes imputed to Mr. Gladstone as a supreme merit that, belonging essentially to the middle class, he should have acquired so unchallenged an ascendency over the Whig aristocracy, traditionally the proudest in the world, of England. But it must be recollected that Mr. Gladstone was the son of an opulent baronet, and that if he was not exactly born into the governing classes, he was from the first educated amongst them, unconsciously contracted their modes of thought, and made his earliest and most enduring friendships amongst them. Eton and Oxford never turned out a Tory of a more orthodox and uncompromising kind than the young member for Newark, whose work on Church and State, Macaulay criticised so pitilessly in the "Edinburgh Review." Even now it is a disadvantage to a man entering the House of Commons, not to have passed through some portion of the conventional training of England, whether of the college or the regiment; half a century since it was a positive disqualification. There is no single difficulty which the nature of his antecedents entailed upon the young Disraeli from which the young Gladstone did not enjoy an absolute immunity.

If, in 1837, the newly elected member for Maidstone was not to merge himself in the lists of mediocrity, was not in fact to acquiesce in the doom of effacement, it was clearly obligatory upon him to adopt a line of his own, more or less startling, and to leave nothing undone which would impress the public mind with the image of his personality and with a sense of his power. The mere circumstance that he was the author of some unusually brilliant books had fixed attention upon him, had even placed him on a pedestal, but had also raised against him a sentiment of distrust, natural to an assembly largely composed of those squires, one of the most representative of whom, on a well known occasion, "thanked Heaven that he had always voted against that damned intellect," and added piously that "he always intended to do so.'

Lord Beaconsfield has been reproached with being wholly given over to personal ambition. He was not, it is said, a patriot at all. He was simply a clever, uncrupulous promoter of his individual success. The censure is as meaningless as it is stereotyped. What is it which divides ambition from patriotism? Who can say at what point the former ceases to be indispensable to the latter? How is a man to place himself in the position of serving his country unless he first secures the ear of his country; and how is he to do this unless, as a preliminary, he advances himself and takes his stand on a commanding platform?

That the policy of Lord Beaconsfield, when he obtained the opportunity of moulding a policy and secured for it the approval of the English people, was eminently patriotic and was in conform ity with the best traditions of English statesmanship, has already been shown. Ambition is a part of patriotism. The motives which are the primum mobile of the patriot must always be beyond the ken of the critic. It is by his external action only, and its results, that the patriot can be judged. It may be confidently predicted that the more calmly and impartially the career of Lord Beaconsfield is examined the more contemptuously will history reject the charge, often and mechanically brought against him, of being a political adventurer. He made politics his profession. He fought his way by dint of his intrepidity, his intellectual power, his knowledge of human nature, his eloquence, his wit, his literary skill. He must therefore be classed with such men as Chatham and his son, with Burke, Macaulay, and Mr. Gladstone himself. Nor will Lord Beaconsfield ever be recognised as an adventurer in the sense that he changed his principles with the times, that he deserted a falling cause just soon enough to pin his allegiance to the winning colors, that he subordinated principles to expediency. "The Letters of Runnymede, "The Spirit of Whiggism," "The Vindication of the British Constitution," and the novels of "Sybil," "Tancred," and "Coningsby'' contain the articles of that political creed to which Lord Beaconsfield was true throughout his life. The very reasons which caused him to be dissatisfied with

the Reform Bill of 1832 were the conclusive arguments in favor of his own Reform Bill of thirty-five years later.

For Disraeli not to have commenced in 1842 the attack on Sir Robert Peel, which he brought to so memorable and dramatic an issue four years later, would have been equivalent to a refusal to interpret the dominant feeling of the party to which he had attached himself, and to have missed deliberately the great opportunity of his life. It is said that Disraeli only turned upon Peel after the latter had refused him a place in his Administration. There is positively no truth in this statement, and the explanation of it is that some years previously an application had been made to Sir Robert Peel on behalf of Disraeli for a foreign consulship. Peel's conversion to free trade may be vindicated on many grounds. Without it Ireland might have been desolated by famine, and England plunged in civil war. Nor had Peel himself abstained from giving many years later some indications of the direction in which his thoughts were setting. The truth is, that Sir Robert Peel was one of those statesmen who, Conservative by nature, are not stationary, cannot, so long as progress seems safe and seems also to be demanded by the spirit of the age, choose but be progressive. In this respect the resemblance between him and Mr. Gladstone is striking. The "Croker Papers," edited by Mr. Jennings, contain conclusive evidence that long before parliamentary reform was an accomplished fact or free trade thought of, Sir Robert Peel's mind was in a state which was distinctly prophetic of a great change soon about to come over his political views and his policy.

"Do not you think," he writes to Croker on March the 3rd, 1820, "that the tone of England--of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and newspaper paragraphs which is

called public opinion-is more Liberal, to use an odious but intelligible phrase, than the policy of the Government? Do not you think that there is a feeling becoming daily more general and more confirmed in favor of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country? It seems to me a curious crisis when public opinion never had such influence on public measures, and yet never was so dissatisfied with the share which it possessed. It is growing too large for the channels that it has been accustomed to run through. God knows it is very difficult to widen them exactly

in proportion to the size and the force of the current which they have to convey, but the engineers that made them never dreamt of various streams that are now struggling for a vent."

However great and however pathetic the interest of this passage, however distinctly it foreshadows the revolution through which Peel was in the course of the next quarter of a century to pass, it is no answer to the statement that when he threw Protection overboard he abandoned the principles which the Conservatives had placed him in power to support. In doing so he naturally broke up the Conservative party, and when Disraeli delivered his invectives against the then Prime Minister, he saw the whole Conservative connection in a state of solution, and he knew that the doom of Conservatism, of the Peelite kind, had sounded. His speeches therefore on this occasion must be regarded as something more than destructive. They were intended not only to convince the House of Commons that the man who made them was the natural leader of the party to which he appealed, a head and shoulders above all his rivals, but further to inspire both the House of Commons and the country with the conviction that when the time came he would not shrink from the effort to recreate Conservatism on a new and stable basis. His onslaughts were bitter and merciless, but a popular chamber is not the place for rose-water polemics. The great thing is that they were uttered with a full sense of responsibility, and that a few years later Disraeli shrunk from none of the obligations they had imposed. By this time Protection was dead, and the severest criticism which can be passed upon the erewhile champion of Protection, is that, at the very moment when he was denouncing Peel, he foresaw, as clearly as did Peel himself, its imminent and inevitable dissolution.

The more closely and coolly Lord Beaconsfield's career is examined, the more manifest will it become that the levity with which he was reproached was due to two causes never thoroughly understood by the English people. There are no features more marked in his intellectual development than his devotion to ideas-as seen in his views of English politics and his interpretation

of English history, as well as in his mastery of humor, sarcasm and wit. Now to ideas the English mind is curiously impervious, while nothing is easier to convince it than that the public man who irradiates his wisdom with the play of a sparkling intellect is secretly laughing in his sleeve at those whom he instructs or flatters. Many passages might be cited from Lord Beaconsfield's writings, which would lend plausible confirmation to such a notion. His sense of the ridiculous was acute, and it was accompanied by a certain intellectual contempt for many things and many persons which he was not able and was perhaps not anxious always to suppress. These qualities were accompanied by some bizarreries of manner and of costume, which half amused and half perplexed the English people. Shortly after he accepted leadership of the Tory party in the House of Commons, he produced a remarkable effect by coming up to the Carlton Club one day from Hughenden in the dress of a country squire of the stage-a low hat, a velvet shooting jacket, breeches and boots. Lord Derby pointed out to him the incongruity of the costume to the place and the character of the wearer, and the incident is only noticeable as furnishing an instance of Lord Beaconsfield's innate whimsicality, which thousands of excellent Englishmen never knew precisely how to interpret.

Again Lord Beaconsfield,-who, so far from possessing the impassive temperament with which he was sometimes credited, was sensitive in an extraordinary degree, and conscious of a spirit of volcanic impetuosity, had schooled himself into a tranquillity and apathy of demeanor which it cost him a perpetual effort to preserve-could not always resist the temptation of giving vent to his real feelings on things and persons in language which was occasionally more witty and pungent than quite suited the prim instinct of British respectability. The same characteristics were noticeable in his conversation when he was one of a company specially formed for his delight. By an interesting coincidence the same kind of charge to which Lord Beaconsfield's manner lent itself was also alleged against the late Bishop Wilberforce. Because that eminent prelate

declined to be dull when he could be witty, because he recognised the ludicrous and laughable as well as the serious side of human affairs, because he could satirise as well as preach, therefore it was assumed he was for ever playing a part. Readers of the interesting biography of him recently published, now know the absurdity of this imputation. It is an imputation which, if equally incurred by, has been equally exploded in, the case of Lord Beaconsfield. The last few years of Lord Beaconsfield's life, and it must be re

membered they were the first when he was in a position to give effect to his ideas and had a parliamentary majority which enabled him to formulate and execute a policy, supply us with the materials for anticipating the verdict of posterity on one who was a British statesman of the Imperial type, and whose ideas, if sometimes they were not appreciated, or were premature, were always characterised by consummate insight, and never lacked the stamp of grandeur.-Temple Bar.

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IN his Roman Questions, that delightful storehouse of old-world lore, Plutarch asks "When a man who has been falsely reported to have died abroad, returns home alive, why is he not admitted by the door, but gets up on the tiles, and so lets himself down into the house?" The curious custom to which Plutarch here refers prevails in modern Persia, for we read in Hajji Baba" (c. 18) of the man who went through the ceremony of making his entrance over the roof, instead of through the door; for such is the custom, when a man who has been thought dead returns home alive." From a passage in Agathias (ii. 23) we may, perhaps, infer that the custom in Persia is at least as old as the sixth century of our era. A custom so remote from our modern ways must necessarily have its roots far back in the history of our race. Imagine a modern Englishman, whom his friends had given up for dead, rejoining the home circle by coming down the chimney instead of entering by the front door. In this paper I propose to show that the custom originated in certain primitive beliefs and observances touching the dead-beliefs and observances by no means confined to Greece and Rome, but occurring in similar if not identical forms in many parts of the world.

*For a fuller discussion of special points the reader is referred to the forthcoming number of the "Journal of the Anthropological Institute."

The importance attached by the Romans in common with most other nations to the due performance of burial rites is well known, and need not be insisted on.

For the sake of my argu

ment, however, it is necessary to point out that the attentions bestowed on the dead sprang not so much from the affections as from the fears of the survivors. For, as every one knows, ghosts of the unburied dead haunt the earth and make themselves exceedingly disagreeable, especially to their undutiful relatives. Instances would be superfluous; it is the way of ghosts all the world over, from Brittany to Samoa.* But burial by itself was by no means a sufficient safeguard against the return of the ghost; many other precautions were taken by primitive man for the purpose of excluding or barring the importunate dead. Some of these precautions I will now enumerate. They exhibit an ingenuity and fertility of resource worthy of a better cause.

In the first place, an appeal was made to the better feelings of the ghost. He was requested to go quietly to the grave, and at the grave he was requested to stay there.†

But to meet the possible case of hardened ghosts, upon whom moral persuasion would be thrown away, more energetic measures were resorted to. Thus among the South Slavonians and Bohe

*Sebillot," Traditions et superstitions de la Haute Bretagne," i. p. 238; Turner, "Nineteen Years in Polynesia," p. 233. Gray, "China," i. pp. 300, 304.