small. Pictures, vignettes, sketches, epigrams will survive rather
than elaborate works of art; these gems of wit and fancy will have to
be picked out of a mass of rubbish; and they will be enjoyed for their
vivacious originality and Voltairean pungency, not as masterpieces or
complete creations. That Disraeli wrote much stuff is true enough.
But so did Fielding, so did Swift, and Defoe, and Goldsmith. Writers
are to be judged by their best; and it does not matter so very much if
that best is little in bulk. Disraeli's social and political satires
have a peculiar and rare flavour of their own, charged with an insight
and a vein of wit such as no other man perhaps in this century has
touched--so that, even though they be thrown off in sketches and
sometimes in mere _jeux d'esprit_, they bring him into the company of
Swift, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. He is certainly inferior to all
these mighty satirists both in wit and passion, and also in definite
purpose. But he has touches of their lightning-flash irradiating
contemporary society. And it seems a pity that the famous _Men of
Letters_ series which admits (and rightly admits) Hawthorne and De
Quincey, could find no room for the author of _Ixion in Heaven_, _The
Infernal Marriage_, _Coningsby_, and _Lothair_.

Disraeli's literary reputation has suffered much in England by the
unfortunate circumstance of his having been the leader of a political
party. As the chief of a powerful party which he transformed with
amazing audacity, as the victorious destroyer of the old Whig oligarchy
and the founder of the new Tory democracy, as a man of Jewish birth and
alien race, as a man to whom satire was the normal weapon and bombastic
affectation a deliberate expedient for dazzling the weak--Disraeli,
even in his writings, has been exposed in England to a bitter system of
disparagement which blinds partisans to their real literary merit. His
political opponents, and they are many and savage, can see little to