not tell the mistress [of] so experienced a cuisine as you to add a small quantity of onion in frying the tomatas.’8
I travelled through the whole of Andalusia on horseback [he reported with pride to Benjamin Austen]. I was never less than twelve hours on my steed, and more than once saw the sun set and rise without quitting my saddle, which few men can say, and I never wish to say again. I visited Cadiz, Seville, Cordova and Granada…I sailed upon the Guadalquivir, I cheered at bullfights; I lived for a week among brigands and wandered in the fantastic halls of the delicate Alhambra [a building which stood comparison, he thought, with the Parthenon and York Minster].
I entered Spain a sceptic with regard to their robbers, and listened to all their romances with a smile. I lived to change my opinion. I at length found a country where adventure is the common course of existence.9
‘Run, my dear fellow, to Seville,’ he told Austen in another letter, ‘and for the first time in your life know what a great artist is – Murillo, Murillo, Murillo!’10
On his way to Córdoba, riding by moonlight, his party’s guide suddenly informed them that ‘he heard a trampling of horses in the distance’, and Disraeli gave an entertaining description of his alarm in a letter to his sister:
Ave Maria! A cold perspiration came over me. Decidedly they approached, but rather an uproarious crew. We drew up out of pure fear, and I had my purse ready. The band turned out to be a company of actors travelling to Cordova. There they were, dresses and decorations, scenery and machinery, all on mules and donkeys. The singers rehearsing an opera; the principal tragedian riding on an ass; and the buffo, most serious, looking as grave as night, with a cigar, and in greater agitation than them all. Then there were women in side-saddles, and whole panniers of children…All irresistibly reminded me of Cervantes. We proceed and meet a caravan of armed merchants, who challenged us, and I nearly got shot for not answering in time. Then come two travelling friars who give us their blessing and then we lose our way. We wander about all night, dawn breaks, and we stumble on some peasants sleeping in the field amid their harvest. We learn that we cannot regain our road, and, utterly wearied, we finally sink to sound sleep with our pack-saddles for our pillows.11
The occasional complaints about his health in his letters are at odds with passages of cheerfully facetious self-congratulation:
I maintain my reputation of being a great judge of costume to the admiration and envy of many subalterns [he had written from Gibraltar]. I have also the fame of being the first who ever passed the Straits with two canes, a morning and an evening cane. I change my cane as the gun fires…It is wonderful the effect these magical wands produce.12
He later added a fan to his accoutrements, which made the canes ‘extremely jealous’.
At the Alhambra in Granada, so Meredith said, the elderly guide was convinced that Disraeli ‘was a Moor, many of whom come to visit this palace, which, they say, will be theirs yet again. His southern aspect, the style in which he paced the gorgeous apartments and sat himself in the seat of the Abencerrajes [a prominent family in the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada in the fifteenth century], his parting speech, “Es mi casa”, “This is my palace”, all quite deceived the guide.’
‘Oh! Wonderful Spain!’ Disraeli wrote enthusiastically to his sister on 14 August. ‘Think of this romantic land covered with Moorish ruins and full of Murillo!…I thought that enthusiasm was dead within me and that nothing could be new. I have hit perhaps upon the only country which could have upset my theory, a country of which I have read little, and thought nothing, a country of which, indeed, nothing has been written and which few visit.’ ‘I dare to say’, he added, ‘that I am better.’
He was occasionally homesick, though. ‘Write to me about Bradenham,’ he told Sarah, ‘about dogs and horses, gardens, who calls, who my father sees in London, what is said. That is what I want. Never mind public news…Keep on writing but don’t bore yourself. A thousand, thousand loves to all. Adieu, my beloved. We shall soon meet. There is no place like Bradenham, and each moment I feel better I want to come back.’13
A few days after this letter was written, Disraeli and Meredith sailed for Malta, where they were incarcerated for a week in the Lazaretto before being allowed out to take rooms at Beverley’s, a much better hotel than the ‘horrid’ Griffith’s Hotel in Gibraltar.
Valetta, the capital of Malta, was a place of which he expected nothing and found much, Disraeli wrote in a letter to Benjamin Austen. Indeed, he said, ‘it surprises me as one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited, something between Venice and Cadiz…It has not a single tree but the city is truly magnificent, full of palaces worthy of Palladio.’14
Here they met a handsome and dissipated young man, a most energetic womanizer, James Clay, who had been at Oxford with Meredith. He was the son of a rich merchant and a nephew of Sir William Clay, Secretary to the Board of Control in Lord Melbourne’s ministry. He had chartered an impressive fifty-five-ton yacht with a crew of seven, and was attended by an equally impressive-looking manservant with mustachios which, in Disraeli’s words, ‘touch the earth. Withal mild as a lamb, tho’ daggers always about his person.’ This was Giovanni Battista Falcieri, Byron’s former manservant.15
The presence of Clay [observed Robert Blake in his excellent account of Disraeli’s tour] removed whatever restraining influence Meredith may have had on Disraeli. He now behaved with a flamboyance, conceit and affectation which did him no good, though he seems to have been wholly unaware of this in his letters.16
‘Affectation tells here even better than wit,’ Disraeli wrote from Malta. ‘Yesterday at the racket court [as I was] sitting in the gallery among strangers, the ball entered, slightly struck me, and fell at my feet. I picked it up and, observing a young rifleman excessively stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its passage into the court, as I really had never thrown a ball in my life. This incident has been the general subject of conversation at all the messes today.’17
It is most doubtful that this kind of affectation created such ‘a good impression’ as Disraeli thought it did; or that his collection of pipes – his ‘Turkish pipe six feet long with an amber mouth piece’, his Meerschaum, and his ‘most splendid Dresden green china pipe’ – helped him to become the ‘greatest smoker in Malta’. Nor can his flamboyant clothes have elicited the admiration he liked to suppose, consisting, as one outfit did, of ‘the costume of a Greek pirate, a blood-red shirt with silver studs as big as shillings, an immense scarf or girdle full of pistols and daggers, a red cap, red slippers, blue broad-striped jacket and trousers…Excessively wicked.’18 This ensemble, so James Clay assured him, helped him to achieve a ‘complete and unrivalled triumph’, a description more suited to Disraeli’s own opinion of his success than to Clay’s. Indeed, Clay, who later became an authority on whist and Member of Parliament for Hull, gave Sir William Gregory, an Irish Member, the impression that Disraeli on Malta had been an object of derision and distaste rather than admiration.
‘It would not have been possible to have found a more agreeable, unaffected companion when they were by themselves,’ Gregory wrote. ‘But when they got into society, his coxcombry
