think of _Vivian Grey_ as a work of amazing novelty, to the fact that
the _genre_ it represents to us was one which had been lifted into high
credit the year before by the consecrated success of _Tremaine_, and was
at that moment cultivated by a multitude of minor novelists.

There was, however, a distinction, and it lay in the greater fund of
animal spirits which Disraeli brought to his business. _Vivian Grey_ was
absurd, but it was fresh and popular, and it pleased at once. As the
opening work of a literary career, it promised well; the impertinent
young gentleman dashed off to Parnassus at a gallop. It was a bold bid
for personal distinction, which the author easily perceived already to
be "the only passport to the society of the great in England." _Vivian
Grey_ is little more than a spirited and daring boy's book; Disraeli
himself called it "a hot and hurried sketch." It was a sketch of what he
had never seen, yet of what he had begun to foresee with amazing
lucidity. It is a sort of social fairy-tale, where every one has
exquisite beauty, limitless wealth, and exalted rank, where the
impossible and the hyperbolic are the only homely virtues. There has
always been a tendency to exalt _Vivian Grey_ at the expense of _The
Young Duke_ (1831), Disraeli's next leading permanence; and, indeed, the
former has had its admirers who have preferred it to all the others in
this period. The difference is, however, not so marked as might be
supposed. In _The Young Duke_ the manner is not so burlesque, but there
is the same roughness of execution, combined with the same rush and
fire. In either book, what we feel to-day to be the great objection to
our enjoyment is the lack of verisimilitude. Who can believe in the
existence of persons whose titles are the Earl of Fitz-Pompey and Baron
Deprivyseal, or whose names are Lady Aphrodite and Sir Carte Blanche?
The descriptions are "high-falutin" beyond all endurance, and there is
particularly noticeable a kind of stylistic foppery, which is always