merit of the work lies in its undercurrents, or, rather it would consist
in this feature if the judgment of the writer were still more matured.
Perhaps Mr. D'Israeli, who began the world of letters as a writer of
fashionable novels, may leave us a work on metaphysics.

In the opening chapter of Contarini Fleming, Mr. D'Israeli explains his
object as follows:--]

I am desirous of writing a book which shall be all truth, a work of which
the passion, the thought, the action, and even the style, should spring
from my own experience of feeling, from the meditations of my own
intellect, from my own observation of incident, from my own study of the
genius of expression.

[We can only admit a passage which appears to us to contain much
world-knowledge and wholesome experience--what half the coroneted heads in
Europe lack most lamentably. It is the advice tendered to Contarini by his
father, previous to the youth of promise repairing to the University:]

I wish you to mix as much as is convenient with society. I apprehend that
you have, perhaps, hitherto indulged a little too much in lonely habits.
Young men are apt to get a little abstracted, and occasionally to think
that there is something singular in their nature, when the fact is, if
they were better acquainted with their fellow creatures, they would find
they were mistaken. This is a common error, indeed the commonest. I am not
at all surprised that you have fallen into it. All have. The most
practical business-like men that exist have many of them, when children,
conceived themselves totally disqualified to struggle in the world. You
may rest assured of this. I could mention many remarkable instances. All
persons, when young, are fond of solitude, and, when they are beginning to