and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is
gained by very few; and that too at the expense of social pleasure,
health, conscience, life. Yet what power of manhood in passionate
intenseness, appealing at the same time to the subject and the votary, can
rival that which is exercised by the idolised chieftain of a great public
school? What fame of after days equals the rapture of celebrity that
thrills the youthful poet, as in tones of rare emotion he recites his
triumphant verses amid the devoted plaudits of the flower of England?
That's fame, that's power; real, unquestioned, undoubted, catholic. Alas!
the schoolboy, when he becomes a man, finds that power, even fame, like
everything else, is an affair of party.

Coningsby liked very much to talk politics with Millbank. He heard things
from Millbank which were new to him. Himself, as he supposed, a high Tory,
which he was according to the revelation of the Rigbys, he was also
sufficiently familiar with the hereditary tenets of his Whig friend, Lord
Vere. Politics had as yet appeared to him a struggle whether the country
was to be governed by Whig nobles or Tory nobles; and he thought it very
unfortunate that he should probably have to enter life with his friends
out of power, and his family boroughs destroyed. But in conversing with
Millbank, he heard for the first time of influential classes in the
country who were not noble, and were yet determined to acquire power. And
although Millbank's views, which were of course merely caught up from his
father, without the intervention of his own intelligence, were doubtless
crude enough, and were often very acutely canvassed and satisfactorily
demolished by the clever prejudices of another school, which Coningsby had
at command, still they were, unconsciously to the recipient, materials for
thought, and insensibly provoked in his mind a spirit of inquiry into
political questions, for which he had a predisposition.