Excerpt from The Letters of Runnymed
It may be admitted at once that the political and historical interest of The Letters of Runnymede has very largely evaporated. The delinquencies of Lord Melbourne and his colleagues, the unholy alliance with O'Connell, the municipal corporations bill, and Lord John's appropriation clause are matters of concern to few but specialist's; nor is it possible to feel, for their own sakes, a very lively interest in such persons of minor importance in their transient day as Mr. Spring Rice, Lord Glenelg, or Sir John Cam Hobhouse, who, forgotten as a politician, unread as a man of letters, has achieved a sort of ambiguous and dependent immortality as the rather tiresome companion of Childe Harold on his pilgrimage. Disraeli, indeed, noted in his diary, with his usual amazing self-complacency, that by these letters he had established his character as a great political writer.' To ask how such a character could have been established by a publication of which the author boasted the inviolable anonymity is beside the mark; for the secret was probably never more than an secret de Polichinelle, and when the letters were reprinted there was appended to them a treatise on the Spirit of Whiggism, which no one could have doubted was by the same hand as the Vindication of the English Constitution, published as Disraeli's in the previous year. Such light anachronistic dust as the claim to have assisted at Lord John Russell's debut in Parliament, or to have chatted with Richard Cumberland, can have confused the eyes of no intelligent readers.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Letters of Runnymed (Classic Reprint) (Benjamin Disraeli)