for what he accomplishes with less manifest success in another. There is
no doubt that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until very
lately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a politician. But he
was an author long before he became a statesman, and it certainly is a
little curious that even in his youth, although he was always
commercially successful with his books, they were never, as we say,
"taken seriously" by the critics. His earliest novels were largely
bought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were barely accepted as
contributions to literature. If we look back to the current criticism of
those times, we find such a book as _Dacre_, a romance by the Countess
of Morley, which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity and
a consideration never accorded to _The Young Duke_ or to _Henrietta
Temple_. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in the manner of Lucian and
Swift, which seem to us among the most durable ornaments of light
literature in the days of William IV., were read and were laughed at,
but were not critically appraised.

So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life, such books as
_Coningsby_ and _Tancred_ were looked upon as amusing commentaries on
the progress of a strenuous politician, not by any means, or by any
responsible person, as possible minor classics of our language. And at
his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults
which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are
now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most
brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been
undistinguished 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