appeared, approached, and greeted them. He thanked Apollonia for
her permission to pay his respects to her, which he had long
wished to do; and then they were all presented, and he said exactly
the right thing to every one."

Disraeli began his career, as I have pointed out in the earlier part of
this essay, as a purveyor of entertainment to the public in a popular
and not very dignified kind. He contended with the crowd of fashionable
novelists whose books consoled the leisure of Mrs. Wititterly as she
reclined on the drawing-room sofa. He found rivals in Bulwer and Mrs.
Gore, and a master in Plumer Ward. His brilliant stories sold, but at
first they won him little advantage. Slowly, by dint of his inherent
force of genius, his books have not merely survived their innumerable
fellows, but they have come to represent to us the form and character of
a whole school; nay, more, they have come to take the place in our
memories of a school which, but for them, would have utterly passed away
and been forgotten. Disraeli, accordingly, is unique, not merely because
his are the only fashionable novels of the pre-Victorian era which any
one ever reads nowadays, but because in his person that ineffable manner
of the "thirties" reaches an isolated sublimity and finds a permanent
place in literature. But if we take a still wider view of the literary
career of Disraeli, we are bound to perceive that the real source of the
interest which his brilliant books continue to possess is the evidence
their pages reveal of the astonishing personal genius of the man. Do
what we will, we find ourselves looking beyond Contarini Fleming and
Sidonia and Vivian Grey to the adventurous Jew who, by dint of infinite
resolution and an energy which never slept, conquered all the prejudices
of convention, and trod English society beneath his foot in the
triumphant irony of success. It is the living Disraeli who is always
more salient than the most fascinating of his printed pages.