Queen's expenditure with a view to a root and branch reform of the Civil List,

the Prime Minister brought all the resources of his powerful and ingenious
eloquence to the support of the Crown. He was completely successful; and amid

a scene of great disorder the motion was ignominiously dismissed. Victoria was
relieved; but she grew no fonder of Mr. Gladstone.

It was perhaps the most miserable moment of her life. The Ministers, the
press, the public, all conspired to vex her, to blame her, to misinterpret her

actions, to be unsympathetic and disrespectful in every way. She was "a
cruelly misunderstood woman," she told Mr. Martin, complaining to him bitterly

of the unjust attacks which were made upon her, and declaring that "the great
worry and anxiety and hard work for ten years, alone, unaided, with increasing

age and never very strong health" were breaking her down, and "almost drove
her to despair." The situation was indeed deplorable. It seemed as if her

whole existence had gone awry; as if an irremediable antagonism had grown up
between the Queen and the nation. If Victoria had died in the early seventies,

there can be little doubt that the voice of the world would have pronounced
her a failure.

III
But she was reserved for a very different fate. The outburst of republicanism

had been in fact the last flicker of an expiring cause. The liberal tide,
which had been flowing steadily ever since the Reform Bill, reached its height

with Mr. Gladstone's first administration; and towards the end of that
administration the inevitable ebb began. The reaction, when it came, was

sudden and complete. The General Election of 1874 changed the whole face of
politics. Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals were routed; and the Tory party, for

the first time for over forty years, attained an unquestioned supremacy in
England. It was obvious that their surprisingtriumph was pre-eminently due to

the skill and vigour of Disraeli. He returned to office, no longer the dubious
commander of an insufficient host, but with drums beating and flags flying, a

conquering hero. And as a conquering hero Victoria welcomed her new Prime
Minister.

Then there followed six years of excitement, of enchantment, of felicity, of
glory, of romance. The amazing being, who now at last, at the age of seventy,

after a lifetime of extraordinary struggles, had turned into reality the
absurdest of his boyhood's dreams, knew well enough how to make his own, with

absolute completeness, the heart of the Sovereign Lady whose servant, and
whose master, he had so miraculously become. In women's hearts he had always

read as in an open book. His whole career had turned upon those curious
entities; and the more curious they were, the more intimately at home with

them he seemed to be. But Lady Beaconsfield, with her crackedidolatry, and
Mrs. Brydges-Williams, with her clogs, her corpulence, and her legacy, were

gone: an even more remarkablephenomenon stood in their place. He surveyed
what was before him with the eye of a past-master; and he was not for a moment

at a loss. He realised everything--the interacting complexities of
circumstance and character, the pride of place mingled so inextricably with

personal arrogance, the superabundant emotionalism, the ingenuousness of
outlook, the solid, the laborious respectability, shot through so

incongruously by temperamental cravings for the coloured and the strange, the
singular intellectual limitations, and the mysteriouslyessential female

elements impregnating every particle of the whole. A smile hovered over his
impassive features, and he dubbed Victoria "the Faery." The name delighted

him, for, with that epigrammatic ambiguity so dear to his heart, it precisely
expressed his vision of the Queen. The Spenserian allusion was very

pleasant--the elegant evocations of Gloriana; but there was more in it than
that: there was the suggestion of a diminutive creature, endowed with

magical--and mythical--properties, and a portentousness almost ridiculously
out of keeping with the rest of her make-up. The Faery, he determined, should

henceforward wave her wand for him alone. Detachment is always a rare quality,
and rarest of all, perhaps, among politicians; but that veteran egotist

possessed it in a supreme degree. Not only did he know what he had to do, not
only did he do it; he was in the audience as well as on the stage; and he took

in with the rich relish of a connoisseur every feature of the entertaining
situation, every phase of the delicate drama, and every detail of his own

consummate performance.
The smile hovered and vanished, and, bowing low with Oriental gravity and

Oriental submissiveness, he set himself to his task. He had understood from
the first that in dealing with the Faery the appropriate method of approach

was the very antithesis of the Gladstonian; and such a method was naturally
his. It was not his habit to harangue and exhort and expatiate in official

conscientiousness; he liked to scatter flowers along the path of business, to
compress a weighty argument into a happy phrase, to insinuate what was in his

mind with an air of friendship and confidentialcourtesy. He was nothing if
not personal; and he had perceived that personality was the key that opened

the Faery's heart. Accordingly, he never for a moment allowed his intercourse
with her to lose the personal tone; he invested all the transactions of State

with the charms of familiar conversation; she was always the royal lady, the
adored and revered mistress, he the devoted and respectful friend. When once

the personal relation was firmly established, every difficulty disappeared.
But to maintain that relation uninterruptedly in a smooth and even course a

particular care was necessary: the bearings had to be most assiduously oiled.
Nor was Disraeli in any doubt as to the nature of the lubricant. "You have

heard me called a flatterer," he said to Matthew Arnold, "and it is true.
Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to royalty you should lay it on

with a trowel." He practiced what he preached. His adulation was incessant,
and he applied it in the very thickest slabs. "There is no honor and no

reward," he declared, "that with him can ever equal the possession of your
Majesty's kind thoughts. All his own thoughts and feelings and duties and

affections are now concentrated in your Majesty, and he desires nothing more
for his remaining years than to serve your Majesty, or, if that service

ceases, to live still on its memory as a period of his existence most
interesting and fascinating." "In life," he told her, "one must have for one's

thoughts a sacred depository, and Lord Beaconsfield ever presumes to seek that
in his Sovereign Mistress." She was not only his own solitary support; she was

the one prop of the State. "If your Majesty is ill," he wrote during a grave
political crisis, "he is sure he will himself break down. All, really, depends

upon your Majesty." "He lives only for Her," he asseverated, "and works only
for Her, and without Her all is lost." When her birthday came he produced an

elaborate confection of hyperbolic compliment. "To-day Lord Beaconsfield ought
fitly, perhaps, to congratulate a powerful Sovereign on her imperial sway, the

vastness of her Empire, and the success and strength of her fleets and armies.
But he cannot, his mind is in another mood. He can only think of the

strangeness of his destiny that it has come to pass that he should be the
servant of one so great, and whose infinite kindness, the brightness of whose

intelligence and the firmness of whose will, have enabled him to undertake
labours to which he otherwise would be quite unequal, and supported him in all

things by a condescending sympathy, which in the hour of difficulty alike
charms and inspires. Upon the Sovereign of many lands and many hearts may an

omnipotent Providence shed every blessing that the wise can desire and the
virtuous deserve!" In those expert hands the trowel seemed to assume the

qualities of some lofty masonic symbol--to be the ornate and glittering
vehicle of verities unrealised by the profane.

Such tributes were delightful, but they remained in the nebulous region of
words, and Disraeli had determined to give his blandishments a more

significant solidity. He deliberately encouraged those high views of her own
position which had always been native to Victoria's mind and had been

reinforced by the principles of Albert and the doctrines of Stockmar. He
professed to a belief in a theory of the Constitution which gave the Sovereign

a leading place in the councils of government; but his pronouncements upon the
subject were indistinct; and when he emphatically declared that there ought to

be "a real Throne," it was probably with the mentaladdition that that throne
would be a very unreal one indeed whose occupant was unamenable to his

cajoleries. But the vagueness of his language was in itself an added stimulant
to Victoria. Skilfully confusing the woman and the Queen, he threw, with a

grandiose gesture, the government of England at her feet, as if in doing so he
were performing an act of personal homage. In his first audience after

returning to power, he assured her that "whatever she wished should be done."
When the intricate Public Worship Regulation Bill was being discussed by the

Cabinet, he told the Faery that his "only object" was "to further your
Majesty's wishes in this matter." When he brought off his great coup over the

Suez Canal, he used expressions which implied that the only gainer by the
transaction was Victoria. "It is just settled," he wrote in triumph; "you have

it, Madam... Four millions sterling! and almost immediately. There was only
one firm that could do it--Rothschilds. They behaved admirably; advanced the

money at a low rate, and the entire interest of the Khedive is now yours,
Madam." Nor did he limit himself to highly-spiced insinuations. Writing with

all the authority of his office, he advised the Queen that she had the
constitutional right to dismiss a Ministry which was supported by a large

majority in the House of Commons, he even urged her to do so, if, in her
opinion, "your Majesty's Government have from wilfulness, or even from

weakness, deceived your Majesty." To the horror of Mr. Gladstone, he not only
kept the Queen informed as to the general course of business in the Cabinet,

but revealed to her the part taken in its discussions by individual members of
it. Lord Derby, the son of the late Prime Minister and Disraeli's Foreign

Secretary, viewed these developments with grave mistrust. "Is there not," he
ventured to write to his Chief, "just a risk of encouraging her in too large

ideas of her personal power, and too great indifference to what the public
expects? I only ask; it is for you to judge."

As for Victoria, she accepted everything--compliments, flatteries, Elizabethan
prerogatives--without a single qualm. After the long gloom of her bereavement,

after the chill of the Gladstonian discipline, she expanded to the rays of
Disraeli's devotion like a flower in the sun. The change in her situation was

indeed miraculous. No longer was she obliged to puzzle for hours over the
complicated details of business, for now she had only to ask Mr. Disraeli for