Earl of Beaconsfield Benjamin Disraeli

“ With these recollections of the past, let us enter the palace of the present sovereign. With habits of extreme simplicity, and a personal expenditure rigidly economical, the residence of the King of Bavaria, when completed, will be the most extensive and the most sumptuous palace in the world. But, then, it is not merely the palace of a king: it is a temple dedicated to the genius of a nation. The apartments of state, painted in fresco on the grandest scale, bold in design, splendid in colour, breathe the very Teutonic soul. ”

“ CHAPTER VI. The Famous Lord Bohun
He has gone; Mr. Ferrers has departed. What an event! What a marvellous event! A revolution has occurred in the life of Henrietta Ponsonby: she was no longer her own mistress; she was no longer her father’s child. She belonged to another; and that other a stranger, an unknown, and departed being! How strange! And yet how sweet! This beautiful young lady passed her days in pondering over her singular position. In vain she attempted to struggle with her destiny. In vain she depicted to herself the error, perhaps the madness, of her conduct. ”

“ Believe me, you are born to enjoy yourself; nor do I see that you require any other career than the duties of your position. Believe me, my dear Mr. Walstein, life is a great business, and quite enough to employ any man’s faculties.’
‘My youth is fast fading, which I don’t regret,’ replied Walstein, ‘for I am not an admirer of youth. As for station, I attribute no magic to it, and wealth I value only because I know from experience its capacity of producing pleasure; were I a beggar tomorrow, I should be haunted by no uneasy sensations. Pardon me, Madame de Schulembourg ”

“ Believing, therefore, that no change will occur in the disposition of property in this country, I cannot comprehend how our government can become more democratic. The consequence of our wealth is an aristocratic constitution; the consequence of our love of liberty is an aristocratic constitution founded on an equality of civil rights. And who can deny that an aristocratic constitution resting on such a basis, where the legislative, and even the executive office may be obtained by every subject of the realm, is, in fact, a noble democracy? ”

“ TWO or three miles from Cairo, approached by an avenue of sycamores, is Shoubra, a favourite residence of the Pasha of Egypt. The palace, on the banks of the Nile, is not remarkable for its size or splendour, but the gardens are extensive and beautiful, and adorned by a kiosk, which is one of the most elegant and fanciful creations I can remember.
Emerging from fragant bowers of orange trees, you suddenly perceive before you tall and glittering gates rising from a noble range of marble steps. These you ascend, and entering, find yourself in a large quadrangular colonnade of white marble. ”

“ Here, too, was the page of Ferrers, at her side—the beautiful and bright-eyed Spiridion. How strange it was! how very strange! Her simple life had suddenly become like some shifting fairy-tale; but love, indeed, is a fairy, and full of marvels and magic—it changes all things; and the quietest domestic hearth, when shadowed by its wing, becomes as rife with wonders and adventure as if it were the passionate theatre of some old romance. Yes! the bright-eyed Greek page of her mysterious and absent lover was at her side-but then he spoke only Greek. ”

“ The second army of the Grand Seigneur was annihilated, and the road to Constantinople again open to Ibrahim; and the tottering empire of Mahmoud was saved by the intervention of the Russian Autocrat, who felt that it was his own property that was at stake rather than that of the unfortunate Sultan. Mehemet Ali is now on independent sovereign, and it is to the military genius of Europe that he owes this glory; while the once formidable empire of Mahomet is rapidly sinking under an accumulation of evils, the operation of which European diplomacy will in vain attempt to arrest. ”

“ When passions have a little subsided, the industrious ten-pounder, who has struggled into the privileged order of the Commons, proud of having obtained the first step of aristocracy, will be the last man to assist in destroying the other gradations of the scale which he or his posterity may yet ascend; while the new member of a manufacturing district has his eye already upon a neighbouring park, avails himself of his political position to become a county magistrate, meditates upon a baronetcy, and dreams of a coroneted descendant. ”

“ What can be more tame, more uninteresting, more unpromising than all around? Where is there a career?’
‘A career!’ exclaimed Caroline. ‘What, you want to set the world in a blaze! I thought you were a poetic dreamer, a listless, superfine speculator of an exhausted world. And all the time you are very ambitious!’
‘I know not what I am,’ replied Walstein; ‘but I feel that my present lot is an intolerable burthen.’
‘But what can you desire? You have wealth, youth, and station, all the accidents of fortune which nature can bestow, and all for which men struggle. ”

“ Our stout-built constitution throws off with more facility and safety those crude and dangerous humours which must at times arise in all human communities. The march of revolution must here at least be orderly. We are preserved from those reckless and tempestuous sallies that in other countries, like a whirlwind, topple down in an instant an ancient crown, or sweep away an illustrious aristocracy. This constitution, which has secured order, has consequently promoted civilisation ”

“ Taking a general but not a superficial survey of the English character since the Reformation, a thousand circumstances convince me that the salient point in our national psychology is the passion for accumulating wealth, of which industry is the chief instrument. We value our freedom principally because it leaves us unrestricted in our pursuits; and that reverence for law and for all that is established, which also eminently distinguishes the English nation, is occasioned by the conviction that, next to liberty, order is the most efficacious assistant of industry. ”

“ The nation that esteems wealth as the great object of existence will submit to no laws that do not secure the enjoyment of wealth. Now, we deprive wealth of its greatest source of enjoyment, as well as of its best security, if we deprive it of power. The English nation, therefore, insists that property shall be the qualification for power, and the whole scope of its laws and customs is to promote and favour the accumulation of wealth and the perpetuation of property. We cannot alter, therefore, the disposition of property in this country without we change the national character. ”

“ Imogene de Charolois is in the arms of Lothair de Branchimont.
‘We have no time for embraces,’ said Theodore; ‘the horses are ready. The Virgin be praised, all is right. I would not go through such an eight-and-forty hours again to be dubbed a knight on the spot. Have you Mignon?’
‘Mignon, indeed! he has not visited me these two days.’
‘But my letter,’ said Lothair-’you received it?’
‘It was thrown in at my window,’ said the Lady Imogene.
‘My heart misgives me,’ said little Theodore. ‘Away! there is no time to lose. Hist! I hear footsteps. This way, dear friends. Hist! a shout! Fly! ”

“ The memory aches with the effort; there are many buildings attached to it, larger than most temples; there are an infinite number of gates, and obelisks, and colossi; but the imagination cannot refrain from calling up some sacred or heroic procession, moving from Luxor to Karnak, in melodious pomp, through the great avenue of sphinxes, and ranging themselves in glorious groups around the gigantic columns of this sublime structure. ”

“ It is quite impossible that a whole people can be a branch of a legislature. If a whole people have the power of making laws, it is folly to suppose that they will allow an assembly of 300 or 400 individuals, or a solitary being on a throne, to thwart their sovereign will and pleasure. But I deny that a people can govern itself. Self-government is a contradiction in terms. Whatever form a government may assume, power must be exercised by a minority of numbers. ”

“ Ibrahim Pasha, the step-son of Mehemet Ali, was placed at the head of the Egyptian army. Of a short, thick-set figure, he possesses that gigantic strength which Homer so loved in his heroes, and which inspires such respect among barbarous nations. To strike off the head of a bull with a blow of his scimitar—to execute, like Peter the Great, his victims with his own hand—to fall, dead drunk, amid the broken wrecks of champagne bottles, are three diversions of his. ”

“ There were moments, perhaps, when Major Ponsonby, who was not altogether inexperienced in the great world, might sigh, that one so eminently qualified as his daughter to shine even amid its splendour, should be destined to a career so obscure as that which necessarily attended the daughter of a Consul in a distant country. It sometimes cost the father’s heart a pang that his fair and fragrant flower should blush unseen, and waste its perfume even in their lovely wilderness ”

“ The Chambers are but a second-rate Divan, the Prefects but inferior Pachas: a solitary being rules alike in the Seraglio and the Tuileries, and the whole nation bows to his despotism on condition that they have no other master save himself.
The disposition of property in England throws the government of the country into the hands of its natural aristocracy. I do not believe that any scheme of the suffrage, or any method of election, could divert that power into other quarters. It is the necessary consequence of our present social state. ”

“ Learned in human nature, the English constitution holds out privilege to every subject as the inducement to do his duty. As it has secured freedom, justice, and even property to the humblest of the commonwealth, so, pursuing the same system of privileges, it has confided the legislature of the realm to two orders of the subjects—orders, however, in which every English citizen may be constitutionally enrolled—the Lords and the Commons. The two estates of the Peers are personally summoned to meet in their chamber: the more extensive and single estate of the Commons meets by its representatives. ”

“ EGYPTIAN THEBES
THE characteristic of Egyptian architecture is Imagination; of Grecian architecture, Grace. When the Ptolemies assumed the sceptre of the Pharaohs, they blended the delicate taste of Ionia with the rich invention of the Nile; and they produced the most splendid creations of architectural power that can now be witnessed. Such is the refined Philoe—such the magnificent Dendera—such the sumptuous Edfou!
All the architectural remains of the most famous nations and the greatest empires,—the amphitheatres, and arches, and columns of the Romans; the fanes of the Greeks ”

“ As long as the Crown possessed or aspired to despotic power, the feeling of the nation supported the aristocracy in their struggles to establish a free government. The aristocracy of England formed the constitution of the Plantagenets; the Wars of the Roses destroyed that aristocracy, and the despotism of the Tudors succeeded. Renovated by more than a century of peace and the spoils of the Papacy, the aristocracy of England attacked the first Stuarts, who succeeded to a despotism which they did not create. ”

“ The Demos of Athens was an oligarchy living upon slaves. There is a great slave population even in the United States, if a society of yesterday is to illustrate an argument on our ancient civilisation.
But it is useless to argue the question abstractedly.
The phrase ‘the people’ is sheer nonsense. It is not a political term. It is a phrase of natural history. A people is a species; a civilised community is a nation. Now, a nation is a work of art and a work of time. ”