Some Disraelian Phrases.

Otago Witness, Issue 2409, 3 May 1900, Page 72

Some Disraelian Phrases.

Lord BeaconsSeld used to pour forth in a single session as many memorable phrases as the most careful gleaning will now garner in a whole Parliament/ Perhaps it is that he set tlie standard too high, and that what his contemporaries took for an average was really the exclusive monopoly of one man. When will be forgotten the description of Sir Robert Peel catching the Whigs bathing and stealing their clothes? — the allusion to him as the "political burglar" whose "life has been one long Appropriation Clause" ; the Cheap Jack who "bought his party in the cheapest market and sold it in the dearest"?

Or what could be better — whatever may be thought of the taste — than Lord Beaconsfield's comparison of Lord Shaftesbury to "Gamaliel himself with the broad phylacteries of faction upon his brow iv language of majestir> adoration calls ujion his God to witness that he is not as other men, for he is not influenced by party motives."

"Plundering and blundering," used twice — "Imperium et liber tas," also repeated more than onee — the ''extinct volcanoes," "the harebrained chatter of irresponsible frivolity," "intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity," and a hundred happily-coined phrases that became current the moment they were coined, leap at once to the memory.

Or again what could possibly be more magnificently humorous than Lord Beaconsfield's comparisons, at the famous Edinburgh banquet of 1867, in which he boasted of having educated the Tory party, of the two Quarterlies, then in rare and unwonted alliance, to the "Boots of the Blue Bell" and the "Chambermaid of the Red Lion." "Really these Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews no one more^admired than myp4f. But I admire them a-, I do firsl-el&e-', fir^t-rate post-houses, which in old days for half a century or so, to use a Manchester phrase, ' carried on a roaring trade.' Then there comes some revolution of progress which nobody can ever have contemplated. They find things are altered; Boots of the Blue Bell and the Chambermaid of the Red Lion embrace, and they are quite of record in this — in denouncing the infamy of railroads.'' That kind of wit seems almost to have disauueared from public sjjeakiajK, and A as one

consequence, political speeches are not read as they were formerly.^— Daily News.