Whenever Disraeli reaches Venice his style improves, and if he mourns
over her decay, his spirits rise when he has to describe her
enchantments by moonlight. He reserves his most delicate effects for
Greece and Venice:--

"A Grecian sunset! The sky is like the neck of a dove! the rocks
and waters are bathed with a violet light. Each moment it changes;
each moment it shifts into more graceful and more gleaming shadows.
And the thin white moon is above all; the thin white moon, followed
by a single star, like a lady by a page."

There are many passages as sumptuous as this in _Venetia_, the romance
about Byron and Shelley, which Disraeli was thought indiscreet in
publishing so soon after Byron's death. In the story the heroine Venetia
is the daughter of Shelley (Marmion Herbert) and the bride of Byron
(Lord Cadurcis). Marmion is a most melodramatic figure, but the
indiscretions are not noticeable nowadays, while the courage with which
the reviled and hated Shelley is described in the preface to Lord
Lyndhurst as one of "the most renowned and refined spirits that have
adorned these our latter days" is highly characteristic of Disraeli. The
reception of Lord Cadurcis in the House of Peers and the subsequent riot
in Palace Yard mark, perhaps, the highest point in direct narrative
power which the novelist had yet reached; but _Venetia_ was not liked,
and Disraeli withdrew from literature into public life.


II

When Disraeli resumed the art of the novelist, he was no longer talking
of what lay outside his experience when he touched on politics. In 1837