national representatives. With a few rare
exceptions, they are, for the most part,
as unlike senators in their outward appearance
as even Monsieur Roland of the French
Revolution—wearing most of them, figuratively
speaking, ribbons in their shoes, made
of nothing more than red-tape, dusted over
with nothing less than pouncet. Conspicuous
amongst these political mediocrities, however,
as they saunter down towards their accustomed
destination—noticeable, here and there,
an orator with something like an individuality,
or a statesman with something very like a
reputation. Yonder! perched in the saddle,
and guiding his horse at a walking pace past
the Treasury, moves by slowly but surely in
the one inevitable direction, the noble lord, the
ex-premier with the Sphinx-like profile. There,
as I come at last within view of the grey old
minster towers, flashes round the kerbstone
in his brougham, the sprightly veteran who
makes it such a capital joke to guide the
destinies of England, lolling on green cushions
before a green box containing nothing at all
in particular, with a hat cocked rakishly on
one side, and a smart thing always ready to
his lips for every comer—be he some earnest
patriot with a great wrong to speak of, or the
discoverer and proprietor in fee simple of
the last new mare's-nest of diplomacy.

As I cross the open space in my careless
advance towards Westminster Hall, I recollect
the larger purpose of my purely mental
peregrinations. And the fancy then takes
me that by no more than six or eight of the
simplest strides of memory, each one naturally
suggesting another, I shall have passed in
thought over the heads of ten several
generations before those valves of the great state
engine, the glass-doors of the House of
Commons, shall have swung to at the heels
of the leader of her Majesty's opposition
member for Buckinghamshire, whom I have
just encountered at the corner of Palace
Yard. Half-a-dozen historic stepping-stones,
or there-abouts, and we shall be landed at the
distance of three centuries!

STEP THE FIRST. A.D. 1848.

AN interval of very little more than nine
years' duration—scarcely one classic decade—
brings me readily to a date within the
recollection of us all:  to an occurrence, as it were,
of yesterday. I am reminded of that
nineteenth of January, in eighteen hundred
and forty-eight, when yonder novelist-politician
lounging on before me was witness to a
tranquil death he himself has since then
gracefully and impressively commemorated—
that of his venerable father, the accomplished
author of the Curiosities of Literature. A
dissolution so entirely in the natural order of
things—resulting from a calm decay of the
vital energies in a ripe old age, surrounded
by all the consolations of a blameless and,
still more, of an eminently useful and
meritorious life—that a son could write of it
befittingly soon afterwards in a tone expressive
of pensive equanimity. The demise of
Isaac Disraeli, in his eighty-second year, has,
in truth, been not inappropriately described
by his filial biographer as constituting, so to
speak, the very Euthanasia of a man-of-letters.
For, it is recorded of him, that almost
immediately before he laid himself down
peacefully to breathe his last in the seclusion of
his country home at Bradenham House in
Buckinghamshire, his publisher had written
to inform him that ALL his works were out of
print, importuning him at once to set about
revising them for a new edition, to appear
either piecemeal or collectively. So ended,
nearly ten years ago, that protracted literary
existence: a life which, commencing rather
unpropitiously for a student-ambition in the
May of seventeen hundred and sixty-six, at
Enfield, was passed, for the most part, in the
quietude of a library, in the midst of a
continual and congenial litter of books and
manuscripts.

STEP THE SECOND. A.D. 1784.

IT recurs to my mind, while I am
musing over this career of the purely
contemplative and entirely successful book-
man, that, in the nineteenth year of his age,
this same Isaac Disraeli who, sixty-four years
afterwards, was to expire amidst the raptures
of a so-called Euthanasia of authorship, stood
in the winter of seventeen hundred and
eighty-four, upon the doorstep of Number
Eight, Bolt Court, Fleet Street, a timorous
poetic aspirant seeking the advice of Doctor
Johnson. It is the forenoon of a foggy day
in November. A packet has been left by the
nervous stripling at that same door a week
previously; and he has called now, by
appointment, in the hope of learning the success
of his little enterprise. A packet, this
appears to have been, containing nothing less
important than a manuscript poem on
Commerce—a didactic poem reprehending its
theme (strange enough, this, from the son of
a Hebrew merchant!) as the enervater of
the human race and the corrupter of society—
and together with these verses a suitable
epistle addressed to the great critic, beseeching
the aid of his wisdom as a literary guide
and counsellor.

That door-step of Number Eight, Bolt-
Court, is our second stepping-stone. It has
carried us at one stride across some sixty-
four years, over nearly two generations.

Hesitating, yet sanguine, as befits at once
the modesty and hopefulness of eighteen,
young Isaac Disraeli is standing there beside
me, waiting the answer to his faint uncertain
knock of trepidation. The door opens at
last,—it is answered (meaning the visitor is
answered) by the doctor's well-known black
servant, Mr. Francis Barber, a form with
which each one is intimately acquainted
through the magic mirror of Boswell's
Biography.