sober truth, he is one who
writes for to-day, and takes no thought of either yesterdays or morrows.
For him the Future is next session; the Past does not extend beyond his
last change of mind. He is a prince of journalists, and his excursions
into monthly literature remain to show how great and copious a master of
the 'leader'--ornate, imposing, absolutely insignificant--his absorption
in politics has cost the English-speaking world.

His Backgrounds.

Disraeli's imagination, at once practical and extravagant, is not of the
kind that delights in plot and counterplot. His novels abound in action,
but the episodes wear a more or less random look: the impression produced
is pretty much that of a story of adventure. But if they fail as stories
they are unexceptionable as canvases. Our author unrolls them with
superb audacity; and rapidly and vigorously he fills them in with places
and people, with faces that are as life and words expressive even as
they. Nothing is too lofty or too low for him. He hawks at every sort
of game, and rarely does he make a false cast. It is but a step from the
wilds of Lancashire to the Arabian Desert, from the cook's first floor to
the Home of the Bellamonts; for he has the Seven-League-Boots of the
legend, and more than the genius of adventure of him that wore them. His
castles may be of cardboard, his cataracts of tinfoil, the sun of his
adjurations the veriest figment; but he never lets his readers see that
he knows it. His irony, sudden and reckless and insidious though it be,
yet never extends to his properties. There may be a sneer beneath that
mask which, with an egotism baffling as imperturbable, he delights in
intruding among his creations; but you cannot see it. You suspect its
presence, because he is a born mocker. But you remember that one of his
most obvious idiosyncrasies is an inordinate love of all that is
sumptuous, glittering, radiant, magnificent; and you incline to suspect
that he keeps his sneering for the world of men, and admires his scenes
and decorations too cordially to visit them with anything so merciless.

His Men and Women.

But dashing and brilliant as are his sketches of places and things, they
are after all the merest accessories. It was as a student of Men and
Women that he loved to excel, and it is as their painter that I praise
him now. Himself a worshipper of intellect, it was intellectually that
he mastered and developed them.