novels of his first and of his second period--that he lingers over the
picture of schoolboy life with tenderness and sympathy. We have only to
compare them, however, to see how great an advance he had made in ten
years in his power of depicting such scenes. The childish dreams of
Contarini are unchecked romance, and though the friendship with Musæus
is drawn with delicacy and insight, and though that is an extremely
pretty scene where Christiana soothes the pride of Contarini, yet a
manliness and a reality are missing which we find in the wonderful Eton
scenes of _Coningsby_.

Disraeli's comprehension of the feelings of half-grown ambitious boys of
good family was extraordinary, and when we consider that he had never
been to a public school, his picture of the life and conversation at
Eton is remarkable for its fidelity to nature. The relation of the elder
schoolboys to one another--a theme to which he was fond of recurring--is
treated in a very adroit and natural spirit, not without a certain
Dorian beauty. This preoccupation with the sentiments and passions of
schoolboys was rather crudely found fault with at the time. We need have
no difficulty in comprehending the pleasure he felt in watching the
expansion of those youthful minds from whom he hoped for all that was to
make England wise and free. The account of Coningsby's last night at
Eton is one of the most deeply felt pages which Disraeli ever composed,
and here it may be said that the careful avoidance of all humour--an act
of self-denial which a smaller writer would not have been capable of--is
justified by the dignified success of a very dangerous experiment.

The portraiture of living people is performed with the greatest
good-nature. It is difficult to believe that the most sensitive and the
most satirised could really be infuriated, so kindly and genial is the
caricaturing. We are far here from Swift's bludgeon and from Voltaire's