Chapter VIII: For a last word to-day

Quite apart from genuine coruscation of genius, and almost as widely separating and casting from account that tinsel and tawdriness which all can detect, one feels a mistrust (gnawing, as it were, within our laurel) that even the best page of Disraeli does not belong to us. We cannot match it somehow with a racy page of Dryden, or of good Sir Walter Scott, of Izaak Walton, John Bunyan, grave Clarendon, Bolingbroke. Gibbon is artificial enough, heaven knows; yet somehow--and one remembers that he had served in the Hampshire Militia--the scent of the hawthorn is never more afar than a field away, even when he discourses of Tertullian or of Diocletian. From Disraeli’s prose--or rather from my sense of it--I can never dispel the smatch of burnt sandalwood, the smell of camels and the bazaar. He officiates, somehow--he, a Prime Minister, over an altar not ours--we admire the oracle, but its tongue is foreign.

Still his fame grows. I observe that, as the incense clears, each successive study of him tells something better. He stands in politics admittedly a champion; in literature, too, a figure certainly not among the greatest, yet as certainly one of the great.

MRS. GASKELL