DISRAELI'S BORROWINGS.
[To THE EDITOR OE' TRH " SPECTATOR:1 Sin,—In his letter in your issue of May 21st Mr. Lovat- Fraser speaks of the phrase "Empire and Liberty" as being " popu- larised" by Disraeli. He, no doubt, had in his mind the pero- ration of Disraeli's speech on agricultural distress on February 11th, 1851, in which he spoke of England as a "land which has achieved the union of those two qualities for combining which a Roman Emperor was deified, Imperium et Libertas." Whether or not Disraeli was imitating the passage in"The Patriot King" mentioned by Mr. Lovat-Fraser, he seems to have put it into Latin for himself. The word used by Twang (" Agricola," III.) is principatus and not imperium. The late Mr. Furneaux once told me how Disraeli was laughed at at the time for his "bad Latin." It would perhaps have been hardly worth while telling this old and well-known (I fancy) story were it not that the phrase has been recently revived in the title of Mr. Bernard Holland's book; and that the Rev. James Wood in his "Dictionary of Quotations" (1893) has not scrupled to attribute it to Cicero !—I am, Oxford.
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