Note 125 — Chapter VI · COLONIES—EMPIRE—FOREIGN POLICY

Of the many passages that may be read in this connection, including that fine ironical one of the Feast of Tabernacles in Tancred, paralleled by that about “Moses Lump” in Heine, and the telling chapter in the Life of Lord George Bentinck, I will only cite one less familiar from Alroy: “... All was silent: alone the Hebrew prince stood, amid the regal creation of the Macedonian captains. Empires and dynasties flourish and pass away; the proud metropolis becomes a solitude, the conquering kingdom even a desert; but Israel still remains, still a descendant of the most ancient kings breathed amid these royal ruins, and still the eternal sun could never arise without gilding the towers of living Jerusalem.” This (with its after-irony of “Alroy’s” seizure by the Kourdish bandits) may be compared with the satire in which Disraeli encountered Mr. Newdegate’s appeals to “prophecy:” “... They have survived the Pharaohs, they have survived the Cæsars, they have survived the Antonines and the Seleucidæ, and I think they will survive the arguments of the right honourable member....” Mr. Morley tells that Mr. Gladstone said that Disraeli asserted that only those nations that behaved well to the Jews prospered. Disraeli, in saying so, however, only repeated a dictum of Frederick the Great.