ndistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers
of the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and then
forgotten." It is only since the beginning of the present century that a
conviction has been gaining ground that some of these books were in
themselves durable, not because they were the work of a man who became
Prime Minister of England and made his sovereign Empress of India, but
as much or as little as if they had been composed by a recluse in a
hermitage. This impression has now become so general with enlightened
critics that the danger seems to be that we should underrate certain
excesses of rhetoric and the Corinthian mode the errors of which used to
be over-emphasised, but should not, in a comparative survey of Victorian
literature, be neglected as serious drawbacks to our perfect enjoyment
of the high-spirited, eloquent, and ardent writings of Benjamin
Disraeli. It is in this spirit of moderation that I now attempt a rapid
sketch of his value as an English author.

I

There is, perhaps, no second example of a writer whose work is divided,
as is that of Disraeli, into three totally distinct periods. Other
authors, as for example, the poet Crabbe, and in a less marked degree
Rogers, have abandoned the practice of writing for a considerable number
of years, and then have resumed it. But the case of Disraeli seems to be
unique as that of a man who pursued the writing, of books with great
ardour during three brief and independent spaces of time. We have his
first and pre-Parliamentarian period, which began with _Vivian Grey_
(1826) and closed with _Venetia_ (1837). We have a second epoch, opening
with _Coningsby_ (1844) and ending with _Tancred_ (1847), during which
time he was working out his political destiny; and we have the novels
which he wrote after he had won the highest distinction in the State.
Certain general characteristics are met with in all these three classes,
but they have also differences which require to be noted and accounted
for. It will, therefore, be convenient to treat them successively.

As oblivion scatters its poppy over the prose fiction of the reigns of
George IV. and William IV., it becomes in creasingly dangerous that
criticism should take the early "fashionable" novels of Disraeli as
solitary representations of literary satire or observation. It is true
that to readers of to-day this class of romance is exclusively
suggestive of _Vivian Gre