PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. THE absorption of an unusually large edition of this work in a very expensive form leads me to hope that a reissue, continued to the date of the death of its noble subject, may not be unacceptable. In all important respects the book remains unaltered, but some notes and illustrations have been cancelled, not because they were uninteresting in themselves, but because they appeared, to a certain extent, to obstruct the course of the narra tive. The space thus obtained has been utilised for the purpose of giving a sketch of the period between 1876-with which year the former issue of this work ended-and the present time. In the new matter, as in the old, I have striven to present a fair and impartial account of the career of the great statesman, whose death all Englishmen alike lament, excluding, on the one hand, panegyric of the kind which Lord Beaconsfield himself would have been the last to desire, and, on the other, criticism of that ungenerous sort with which the students of contemporary history are but too familiar. My own opinions will be found in the preface to the first edition, written now nearly three years ago. My critics have often counselled its suppression, but on looking back over the events of the period which has elapsed since that preface was written, I do not see any reason for altering a word of it. I then recognised Lord Beaconsfield as the one man of political genius whom this century had produced. Nothing that has occurred since that time has changed my opinion. But whatever I may have said in my preface I trust my narrative will be found sufficiently impartial. My object has been to show Lord Beaconsfield as he was, and not to demonstrate how much wiser I should have been in his place. Thus, for example, I am personally an upholder of the principles of Free Trade, but I do not on that account feel myself called upon to denounce Lord Beaconsfield because at one period of his life he accepted what some are pleased to consider |