however, required little fuel. I
set to it again, and it was midnight before I retired to bed."

At this rate we may easily compute that the longest of his novels would
be finished in a week. _Contarini Fleming_ seems to have occupied him
the greater part of a year. He liked the public to think of him,
exquisitely habited, his long essenced hair falling about his eyes,
flinging forth a torrent of musky and mellifluous improvisation; as a
matter of fact he was a very hard worker, laborious in the arts of
composition.

It is to be noted that the whole tone of _Contarini Fleming_ is
intensely literary. The appeal to the intellectual, to the fastidious
reader is incessant. This is an attitude always rare in English fiction,
but at that epoch almost unknown, and its presence in the writings of
Disraeli gives them a cachet. Under all the preposterous conversation,
all the unruly turmoil of description, there runs a strong thread of
entirely sober, political, and philosophical ambition. Disraeli striving
with all his might to be a great poet, of the class of Byron and Goethe,
a poet who is also a great mover and master of men--this is what is
manifest to us throughout _Contarini Fleming_. It is almost pathetically
manifest, because Disraeli--whatever else he grew to be--never became a
poet. And here, too, his wonderful clairvoyance, and his command over
the vagaries of his own imagination, come into play, for he never
persuades himself, with all his dithyrambics, that Contarini is quite a
poet.

A new influence is felt upon his style, and it is a highly beneficial
one. Up to this date, Disraeli had kept Byron before him, and in his
serious moments he had endeavoured to accomplish in prose what the
mysterious and melancholy poet of the preceding generation had done in
verse. The general effect of this Byronism, in spite of a certain
buoyancy which carried the reader onwards, had been apt to be wearisome,
in consequence of the monotony of effort. The fancy of the author had
been too uniformly grandiose, and in the attempt to brighten it up he
had sometimes passed over into positive failure. The most unyielding
admirers of his early novels can hardly contradict a reader who
complains that he finds the adventures of the bandits at Jonstorna
insupportable and the _naivete_ of Christiana mawkish. There are pages
in _Alroy_ that read as if they were written for a wager, to see how
much balderdash the public will endure. Disr