fellow-men, and felt a proud and profound conviction of their perfectibility-as one who devoted himself to the amelioration of his kind, by the destruction of error and the propagation of truth."

A critic may safely rest his case upon these sentences. No poet, after keen experience of life, could end his story with such familiar platitudes. No: in attempting this subject, Mr. Disraeli undertook a task too trying for him. His imaginary poet is, after all, no more than Vivian Grey in a new attitude.

He attained far greater success in Henrietta Temple, which appeared four or five years later. It is a lovestory, and has been called the best of its kind certainly, it is the best fashionable love-story that we know. There is, of course, a hero; there is also a heroine. The one is the rather extravagant but handsome and honourable son of a family whose antiquity is remote, though their possessions are diminished. The other is the delightful daughter of a diplomatist; has violet-tinted eyes, fringed with the longest and the darkest lashes, and has not seen eighteen summers when the hero falls violently in love with her. The scene of their first encounter is in the gardens of Armine, the hero's ancestral residence; gardens marvellous as those of Alcinoüs, enchanting as those of Armida. Disraeli delights in gardens, and is without rival in describing their beauty. Nothing does he love better than to paint the castle or mansion of a great English noble, amid terrace and pleasaunce, park and chase. Certes, the wooing of Ferdinand Armine and. Henrietta Temple, in garden-glades that have been refined

HENRIETTA TEMPLE."

13

The

to perfection by the hand of art, and then allowed to grow even more beautiful through partial neglect, is a charming chapter of fiction. The love-making is for the most part elegantly done, and might suggest ideas to any Romeo or Juliet of the very first fashion. Unluckily, the hero is all this time engaged to somebody else-his cousin, who is very rich, while he is a mere pauper for the heir to a baronetcy, and is moreover deeply in debt. second part of the book is in clever contrast with the first; from scenes of loveliness and lovemaking we are suddenly conveyed to the dens of bill-discounters, by whose means the unlucky hero is attempting to avert ruin. At length he is landed in a sponging-house. One of his best friends at this difficult time is Count Mirabel, an admirable sketch of Count D'Orsay, to whom the book was dedicated. No one, we suppose, will ever take the trouble to write a life of Count D'Orsay, who ought, indeed, to have left an autobiography. He was a typical man; and an analysis of his character and adventures would increase our knowledge of that strange social force called fashion, the same force, in human affairs, apparently, as that which induces a flock of sheep to follow the bell-wether. The system of a successful leader of fashion-a bubble swimming on the surface of society-is epigrammatically put in Henrietta Temple.

66

Fancy a man ever being in low spirits!" says the Count Mirabel. "Life is too short for such bétises. The most unfortunate wretch alive calculates, unconsciously, that it is better to live than to die. Well, then, he has something in his favour. Existence is a pleasure, and the greatest. The world cannot rob us of that; and if it is better to live

than to die, it is better to live in a good humour than a bad one. If a man be convinced that existence is the greatest pleasure, his happiness may be increased by good fortune, but it will be essentially independent of it. He who feels that the greatest source of pleasure always remains to him ought never to be miserable. The sun shines on all; every man can go to sleep; if you cannot ride a fine horse, it is something to look upon one; if you have not a fine dinner, there is some amusement in a crust of bread and Gruyère. Feel slightly, think little, never plan, never brood. Everything depends on the circulation; take care of it. Take the world as you find it; enjoy everything. Vive la bagatelle!"

The joyous Epicurean who scatters these apophthegms for his friends' instruction must have had a good circulation to begin with, or his system would have been impracticable. He avers that every man can go to sleep. If this were true, what need of mandragora and cannabis, of opium and the marvellous hydrate of chloral? A hard heart and a strong stomach, according to Talleyrand, are the two essentials of happiness. Clearly, Count Mirabel must have had a perfect digestion, and not too strong a sympathy with his fellow-creatures.

Before passing to Mr. Disraeli's maturer works, a word or two on some of his extravaganzas. He has been cruelly styled

"The wondrous boy

Who wrote Alroy."

and certainly Alroy is an amazing production, which we should be sorry to have to criticise. Much the same must be said of his attempts at poetry-The Revolutionary Epick, and a tragedy called Count Alarcos. Consummate writers of prose are apt to imagine that the faculty of

has tried many forms of literat political biographer, and, for once, Swift in Popanilla, whose hero One of his most amusing and b Ixion in Heaven, a mythological into verse, would make a good the full of piquant points, and its k "Adventures are to the adventurou

T

This saying is dear to its aut Coningsby, uttered by the myster stranger whom the hero first encou where he arrived upon the famo would not have exchanged for he though carved by Lysippus. was Sidonia, the ideal Hebrew of t -richer than all the Rothschilds a Who would not have enjoyed hi subjects his mind seemed to b opinions formed. He flung out a he solved with a phrase some de

muse over for years. He said many things that were strange, yet they immediately appeared to be true." He opened Coningsby's mind, that is certain; he told him that almost everything that is great has been done by youth. He instanced Don John of Austria winning Lepanto at twenty-five; Gaston de Foix, a victor on the plain of Ravenna at twenty-two; John de Medici, a Cardinal at fifteen; Bolingbroke and Pitt, both Ministers of State before most boys have given up their cricket. And wherefore this lecture on youth and genius? Why, Coningsby, issued in 1844, when few men would have predicted a Premier in the Member for Shrewsbury, was not merely a brilliant novel, it was a political manifesto. It was a time when "Young England" came down to the House in white waistcoats, eager for the restoration of Toryism. In Coningsby himself he adumbrated the most brilliant of that party, who was then Member for Canterbury. The idea of "Young England" was not a bad one. The brilliant and opulent sons of the aristocracy were to enter the political arena, and fight the cause of the people, and resuscitate Toryism and the Church, and extinguish the Radicals. But it seems as if the movement came just a little too late. Political progress had gone into a given groove. In old days there was at Eton a joyous triennial festival called the Montem, which Disraeli has felicitously described in Coningsby. The boys went out to Salt Hill, ad Montem; their friends drove down from London in superb equipages; carriages were stopped, and there was a cry of "Salt! salt!" and the salt came freely in the form of money, which went to pay the Cambridge