ful subject for Martin, and a picture from him could alone give you an idea of it.

'This week has been the most delightful of all our travels. We dined every day on the roof of a house by moonlight ; visited the Holy Sepulchre of course, though avoided the other coglionerie. The House of Loretto is probability to them. But the Easterns will believe anything. Tombs of the Kings very fine. Weather delicious; mild summer heat. Made an immense sensation. Received visits from the VicarGeneral of the Pope, two Spanish priors, &c. . . . Mr. Briggs, the great Egyptian merchant, has written from England to say that great attention is to be paid me, because I am the son of the celebrated author.'

The extracts must be cut short. The visit to Jerusalem was in February 1831. In April Disraeli was in Egypt, and ascended the Nile to Thebes. Conceive a feverish and tumultuous dream full of triumphial gates, processions of paintings, interminable walls of heroic sculpture, granite colossi of gods and kings, prodigious obelisks, avenues of sphinxes, and halls of a thousand columns thirty feet in girth and of proportionate height. My eyes and mind yet ache with a grandeur so little in unison with our own littleness. The landscape was quite characteristic; mountains of burning sand. Vegetation unnaturally vivid, groves of cocoa trees, groups of crocodiles, and an ebony population in a state of nudity armed with spears of reeds.'

Far in the future lay the Suez Canal and the influence which the young visitor was one day to exercise over the fortunes of Egypt. The tour was over. His health was recovered. He was to return to England and take to work again, uncertain as yet whether he was not to go back to his Coke and Blackstone. His thoughts for the present were

turned on Bradenham and its inmates. A chest of Eastern armour, pipes, and other curiosities was ready-packed at the end of May, to accompany him home for the decoration of the hall. On May 28 he wrote in high spirits of his approaching return: 'I am delighted with my father's progress. How I long to be with him, dearest of men, flashing our quills together, standing together in our chivalry as we will do, now that I have got the use of my brain for the first time in my life.'

These letters from abroad, and the pictures which Disraeli draws of himself and of his adventures in them, show him as he really was, making no effort to produce an effect, in the easy undress of family confidence, not without innocent vanities, but light-hearted and gay at one moment, at another deeply impressionable with anything which was interesting or beautiful. The affectations which so strongly characterised his public appearances were but a dress deliberately assumed, to be thrown off when he left the stage like a theatrical wardrobe.

The expedition, which had remained so bright to the end, unhappily had a tragic close. On the eve of departure William Meredith caught the small-pox at Alexandria, and died after a few days' illness. His marriage with Sarah Disraeli was to have taken place immediately after their arrival in England. The loss to her was too deep for reparation; she remained single to her own life's close. To Disraeli himself the shock gave 'inexpressible sorrow, and 'cast a gloom over him for many years.'

·

CHAPTER IV

'Contarini Fleming'-The Poetical Life-Paternal advice-A Poet, or not a Poet?— Revolutionary Epic '-Favourable verdict-Success of the Novels-Disraeli a new Star-London Society-Political ambition-Mrs. Wyndham Lewis-Financial embarrassments— Portraits of Disraeli by W. P. Willis-Lady Dufferin and others - Stands for High Wycombe-Speech at the Red Lion-Tory Radicalism— Friendship with Lord Lyndhurst Self-confidence— Vindication of the British Constitution-Conservative ReactionTaunton Election-Crosses swords with O'Connell-The Runnymede Letters - Admitted into the Carlton Club-Henrietta Temple' and 'Venetia.'

THE law had not been finally abandoned-perhaps in deference to Isaac Disraeli's continued anxiety on the subject. Schemes and projects, however, which had shaped themselves in Disraeli's own mind during his travels had to be executed first. He brought home with him a brain restored to energy, though with saddened spirits. There was the 'Revolutionary Epic' to be written, and an Eastern story which was brought out afterwards as the tale of 'Alroy.' Before undertaking either of them, however, he drew a second portrait of himself in 'Contarini Fleming.' Vivian Grey was a clever, independent youth, with the world before him, with no purpose save to make himself conspicuous. Disraeli now hoped to be a poet, and in 'Contarini' his aim, he said, was to trace the development and function of the poetic character. The flippancy of 'Vivian'

is gone. The tone is calm, tender, and at times morbid. The hero is taken through a series of adventures. He tries politics, but politics do not interest him. He falls in love. The lady of his affections dies and leaves him in despair. Contarini revives to find a desire, and perhaps a capacityfor he cannot be confident that he is not deceiving himself -to become the poet which Disraeli was then aspiring to make himself. The outward characteristics of that character could at least be assumed. Contarini becomes a wanderer

like Byron, and visits the same scenes from which Disraeli had just returned. The book contains passages of striking beauty, so striking that Goethe sent praises and compliments, and Milman, who reviewed it, said it was a work in no way inferior to 'Childe Harold,' and equally calculated to arrest public attention. Yet the story ends in nothing. The river loses itself in the sands. Contarini is but Disraeli himself in the sick period of undetermined energies. He meditates on the great problems of life, and arrives at the conclusions adopted almost universally by intellectual men before they have learnt to strike out their course and to control circumstances and their own nature.

'I believe in that destiny before which the ancients bowed. Modern philosophy has infused into the breast of man a spirit of scepticism, but I think that ere long science will become again imaginative, and that as we become more profound we may also become more credulous. Destiny is our will, and our will is nature. The son who inherits the organisation of the father will be doomed to the same fortunes as his sire, and again the mysterious matter in which his ancestors were moulded may in other forms, by a necessary attraction, act upon his fate.

All is mystery;

but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the mystery.'

Such passages as this were not ominous of much success in the high functions to which Contarini was aspiring. Much more interesting, because more natural, is a dialogue which was probably an exact reproduction of a conversation between Disraeli and his father. The father of Contarini entirely objects to his son's proposed destination of himselt.

'What were the great

'A poet !' exclaims the old man. poets in their lifetime? The most miserable of their species -depressed, doubtful, obscure, or involved in petty quarrels and petty persecutions; often unappreciated, utterly uninfluential, beggars, flatterers of men, unworthy even of their recognition. What a train of disgustful incidents! what a record of degrading circumstances is the life of a great poet! A man of great energies aspires that they should be felt in his lifetime; that his existence should be rendered more intensely vital by the constant consciousness of his multiplied and multiplying powers. Is posthumous fame a substitute for all this? Try the greatest by this test, and what is the result? Would you rather have been Homer or Julius Cæsar, Shakespeare or Napoleon? No one doubts. We are active beings, and our sympathy, above all other sympathies, is with great actions. Remember that all this time I am taking for granted you may be a Homer. Let us now recollect that it is perhaps the most impossible incident that can occur. The high poetic talent, as if to prove that the poet is only at the best a wild, although beautiful, error of nature, is the rarest in creation. What you have felt is what I have felt myself. Mix in society and I will answer for it that you lose your poetic feeling; for in you, as in the great majority, it is not a matter of faculty originating in a