biage. But in these
earlier stories the style is generally excellent till it becomes too
ambitious. It has a kind of metallic glitter, brilliant, sparkling with
numerous flashes of wit and fancy, and never wanting in sharpness of
effect, though it may be deficient in delicacy. Yet the author, who is
of necessity to be partly identified with the hero of 'Contarini
Fleming,' is distinctly not a poet; and the incapacity is most evident
when he endeavours to pass the inexorable limits. The distinction
between poetry and rhetoric is as profound as it is undefinable. A true
poet, as possessing an exquisite sensibility to the capacities of his
instrument, does not try to get the effects of metre when he is writing
without its restrictions and its advantages. Disraeli shows occasionally
a want of this delicacy of perception by breaking into a kind of
compromise between the two which can only be called Ossianesque. The
effect, for example, of such a passage as the following is, to my taste
at least, simply grotesque:--

'Still the courser onward rushes; still his mighty heart supports him.
Season and space, the glowing soil, the burning ray, yield to the
tempest of his frame, the thunder of his nerves, and lightning of his
veins.

'Food or water they have none. No genial fount, no graceful tree, rise
with their pleasant company. Never a beast or bird is there, in that
hoary desert bare. Nothing breaks the almighty stillness. Even the
jackal's felon cry might seem a soothing melody. A grey wild cat, with
snowy whiskers, out of a withered bramble stealing, with a youthful
snake in its ivory teeth, in the moonlight gleams with glee. This is
their sole society.'

And so on. Some great writers have made prose as melodious as verse; and
Disraeli can at times follow their example successfully. But one likes
to know what one is reading; and the effect of this queer expression is
as if, in the centre of a solemn march, were incorporated a few
dancing-steps, _a propos_ to nothing, and then subsiding into a regular
pace. Milton wrote grand prose and grand verse; but you are never
uncertain whether a fragment of 'Paradise Lost' may or may not have been
inserted by mere accident in the 'Areopagitica.'

Not to dwell upon such minor defects, nobody can read 'Contarini
Fleming' or 'Henrietta Temple' without recognising the admirable talent
and exuberant vitality of the author. They have the faults of juvenile
performances; they are too gau