D'Israeli, born at
Enfield in May 1766. D'Israeli was of Jewish origin, his ancestors
having fled from the Spanish persecutions of the fifteenth century to
find a home in Venice, whence a younger branch migrated to England.

At the time of his birth his family had stood for generations among
the foremost English Jews, his father having been made a citizen by
special legislation. The boy, however, did not inherit the commercial
spirit which had established his house. He was a lover of books and a
dreamer of dreams, and so early developed literary tendencies that his
frightened father sent him off to Amsterdam to school, in the hope of
curing proclivities so dangerous. Here he became familiar with the
works of the Encyclopaedists, and adopted the theories of Rousseau.
On returning to England in his nineteenth year, he replied to his
father's proposition that he should enter a commercial house at
Bordeaux, by a long poem in which he passionately inveighed against
the commercial spirit, and avowed himself a student of philosophy and
letters. His father's reluctant acquiescence was obtained at last
through the good offices of the laureate Pye, to whom the youth had
already dedicated his first book, 'A Defence of Poetry.'

At the outset of his career he found himself received with
consideration by the men whose acquaintance he most desired. Following
the fashion of the day, and inspired by the books of anecdotes so
successfully published by his friend Douce, D'Israeli in 1791 produced
anonymously a small volume entitled 'Curiosities of Literature,' the
copyright of which he magnanimously presented to his publisher. The
extraordinary success of this book can be accounted for only by the
curious taste of the time, which still reflected the more unworthy
traditions of the Addisonian era. It was an age of clubs and
tea-tables, of society scandal-mongering and fireside gossip; and the
reading public welcomed a contribution whose refined dilettantism so
well matched its own. The mysteries of Eleusis and the origin of wigs
received the same grave attention. This popularity induced D'Israeli
to buy back the copyright at a generous valuation; he enlarged the
work to five volumes, which passed through twelve in his own lifetime,
and still serves to illustrate a curious literary phase.

Other compilations of similar nature met the same success: 'The
Calamities of Authors,' 'Quarrels of Authors,' and 'Literary
Recollections'; but the