that great design of an epic, through whose execution the name of Disraeli the Younger was to have passed to posterity in the same rank with those of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, so dwindled away in its author's mind and got so encrusted with the weed and the drift of commonplace life, that when it appeared as a novel, in all the yet frolicsome buoyancy of his irreverent senectitude, it only landed him in a place to be settled by posterity as somewhat lower than that of M. Eugène Sue, though undoubtedly higher than that of Mr. G. W. M. Reynolds. It was on the plains of Troy that the idea, which may be called the germ of "Lothair," first quickened in Mr. Disraeli's mind. The incubation has been prolonged, not merely for the Horatian nine, but for nine years four times told, of much meditation and many vicissitudes. He had arrived at the mature age of thirty when he saw his long locks mirrored in Scamander's stream; but he had only then begun to experience the delirious dreams of youth. The cold, coarse breath of London life had prematurely aged the heart of the Hebrew boy, and "Vivian Grey" was in truth the work of a blasé sage of eighteen. But, nearing the half-way stage of life, when he touched the soil of Asia, his vanished youth suddenly returned like the summer of Saint Martin, with a gorgeous glow, and a turbulent rush of fantastic fancies, and an obstreperous ambition, and all the dear delightful froth and fireworks of heyday. There where the wisdom of Ulysses and the eloquence of Thersites seemed to haunt the air, he underwent that "baphometic fire-baptism" which has produced a character that is still such a strange amalgam of Eastern fire and Western phlegm. There that mind received its settled form, which equally loves to dwell demure in the region of respectable platitude, or to soar in an empyrean of riotous ideality, curiously resembling a Yankee store far-west, where sometimes you come on petroleum and sometimes on shoddy. There, in fine, never contemplating that his name would one day be written in the list of the Grand Viziers of Great Britain, he pondered the even more audacious achievement of adding a second great epic to the English language; and awfully aspired to do for Napoleon what Milton had done for the Devil.

This is the preface of "the Revolutionary Epick," which is on the title-page described as "The Work of Disraeli the Younger, Author of 'The Psychological Romance.""

It was on the plains of Troy that I first conceived the idea of this work Wandering over that illustrious scene, surrounded by the tombs of heroes and by the confluence of poetic streams, my musing thoughts clustered round VOL. XV.—NO. XXIX. [New Series.]

M

the memory of that immortal song, to which all creeds and countries alike respond, which has vanquished Chance, and defies Time. Deeming myself, perchance, too rashly, in that excited hour, a Poet, I cursed the destiny that had placed me in an age that boasted of being anti-poetical. And while my Fancy thus struggled with my Reason, it flashed across my mind, like the lightning which was then playing over Ida, that in those great poems which rise, the pyramids of poetic art, amid the falling and the fading splendour of less creations, the Poet hath ever embodied the spirit of his Time. Thus, the most heroic incident of an heroic age produced in the Iliad an Heroic Epick; thus, the consolidation of the most superb of Empires, produced in the Æneid a Political Epick; the revival of Learning, and the birth of vernacular Genius, presented us in the Divine Comedy with a National Epick; and the Reformation and its consequences called from the rapt lyre of Milton a Religious Epick.

And the spirit of my Time, shall it alone be uncelebrated?

Standing upon Asia, and gazing upon Europe, with the broad Hellespont alone between us, and the shadow of Night descending on the mountains, these mighty continents appeared to me as it were the Rival Principles of Government, that at present contend for the mastery of the world. "What!” I exclaimed, "is the Revolution of France a less important event than the siege of Troy? Is Napoleon a less interesting character than Achilles? For me remains the Revolutionary Epick."

Full of these thoughts, I descended to the shore, and again embarking, a favouring breeze filled our languid sails; and as the morning broke over the waters of the Propontic Sea, I beheld the glittering minarets and the cypress groves of the last city of the Cæsars.

In that delightful metropolis, more than once my thoughts recurred to my Dardanian reverie; but the distraction of far travel, and the composition of two works long meditated-one devoted to the delineation of the Poetic Character, the other to the celebration of a gorgeous incident in the annals of that sacred and romantic people from whom I derive my blood and name,*finally expelled from my thoughts a conception which, in truth, I deemed too bold.

My return to the strife of civilization recalled old musings; and the work, first conceived amid the sunny isles of the Egean, I have lived to mature, and in great part compose, on the shores of a colder sea, but not less famous land. Yet I have ventured to submit to the public but a small portion of my creation, and even that, with unaffected distrust and sincere humility. Whatever may be their decision, I shall bow to it without a murmur; for I am not one who find consolation for the neglect of my contemporaries in the

* Both these works have been since published: the first is "The Psychological Romance," published under the bibliopolic baptism of "Contarini Fleming," which means nothing: the second is "The Wondrous Tale of Alroy." With respect to the title of the present poem, let me remind hypercritics that Epick is a good substantive, and as such is admitted into the classical dictionary of our language.

imaginary plaudits of a more sympathetic Posterity. The public will, then, decide whether this work is to be continued and completed; and if it pass in the negative, I shall, without a pang, hurl my lyre to Limbo.

The two first books of this revolutionary Epick comprise the pleadings of the rival Genii. The action of the fable commences with the third book. This work, if it be permitted to proceed, will, I hope, evolve a moral, which governors and the governed may alike peruse with profit, and which may teach wisdom both to monarchs and to multitudes.

The public did not, it seems, decide that the specimen of the "Revolutionary Epick" submitted to its view was, on the whole, worthy to be ranked with the "Iliad," the "Eneid," the "Divine Comedy," or even "Paradise Lost; " and Mr. Disraeli has, no doubt, kept his word, and done with his lyre as he promised. He has long ago resigned the hope of teaching wisdom, in this particular way at least, to monarchs and to multitudes; and is now content, taking his motto from Terence

Nosse omnia hæc salus est adolescentulis,

to point out the path of salvation to the golden youth who dwell at the West-end and glitter in the Row. But he has never abandoned the design of painting in a work of imagination the play of the two principles that as he believes contend for the mastery of the world. The revival of the French Empire by a prince, who has tried to find an equilibrium for his throne by balancing the influence of the Revolution against the influence of the Church, evidently banished from his mind the idea of making the first Napoleon his hero. A great poet, almost worshipped by Mr. Disraeli in his youth, has declared that a hero is " an uncommon want; " and it must be admitted that there is some difficulty in finding one near our time suitable to an ambitious genius, who has felt constrained by conventional considerations to relinquish Napoleon Bonaparte. Mr. Disraeli, like Lord Byron, doubtless sometimes said, pondering the many names of famous heroes since Agamemnon,

I condemn none

But can't find any in the present age

Fit for my poem (that is, for my new one);

and so at last it happened that he decided instead on having a heroine, an actual heroine with a nominal hero. The circumstances of a time in which his ambition grew giddy, while his temper was tolerably, or, let it even be admitted,

intolerably tried-the time when he discovered that there was a great combination of Ritualists and Romanists against the English Church, and that the Church of Rome was an Established Church in every country on the globe-these, we say, gave a different form and a common-place colour to the crude and gaudy vision which was first revealed by the lightnings of Ida and fanned by the breezes of the Dardanelles. The conversion of one of the greatest of the Tory toparchs to the Catholic Church about the same time presented a promising thread for the narrative. And so a party landslip, a nine days' wonder of the town, an unsatisfactory intrigue, end in the right honourable gentleman's all at once dropping from the magnificent aspiration of being the ultimate rival of Homer, to the solid satisfaction of being the favourite client of Mr. Mudie. Long in the alembic of his imagination had the great design remained suspended in solution. At last a sudden touch crystallized it. The gorgeous epic that was to have won the suffrages of the world and the ages subsided into an ordinary tale of the town and the season. So can we conceive some ingenious and enthusiastic alchemist of the Middle Ages, who, projecting diamonds and sapphires, finds at last, after life-long labour, at the bottom of his crucible only a tawdry deposit of Bluestone and Glauber salts. The morsel of sham gem, however, the great character of the book, on whom its movement depends, whose influence rules all round her, who gives it whatever of epic impulse and consistency it has, its heroine, in fact, is undoubtedly the lady who is sometimes called Mary Anne and sometimes Theodora Campian. It is a remarkable character assuredly, a very remarkable character, but unluckily for Mr. Disraeli's reputation as a writer of fiction, it is not what can, with any reasonable degree of candour, be called an original character. As he, no doubt unconsciously, borrowed his speech on the Duke of Wellington's death from M. Thiers's panegyric of General Foy, so he has in some strange state of intellectual somnambulism eloped with his revolutionary heroine, and indeed with a good many of her properties and accidents, straightway from the fostering care of no less excellent a writer of fiction than Miss Amelia B. Edwards.

Mr. Disraeli's character is certainly peculiar, and in some respects may be characterised as rather abnormal than original. He avows that he has got two consciences-a historical conscience, as well as the ordinary one common to us all, but which must be weakened in him, we fear, by the somewhat polypous growth of the other. He possesses a very powerful memory, and

also a very powerful imagination; but there would seem to be no boundary between them. With him the memory overlaps the imagination, and the imagination extravasates into the memory. Mr. Disraeli is not capable, we should wish to believe, of deliberately stealing a speech from M. Thiers; he has made quite as many, if not more, and quite as good, if not better, speeches than M. Thiers. Is he capable of the still more silly and easily-detected misdemeanour of appropriating part of a plot and its principal characters from a popular novel hardly four years old? We should prefer to think otherwise. But the facts are very strange and very strong. Probably their true interpretation is that Mr. Disraeli is subject occasionally to a mental malady, which was not known when his father studied so profoundly the character, the amenities, and the calamities of authors, and which, for want of a better name, we may perhaps venture to call Literary Kleptomania.

Miss Edwards published, in the year 1866, a story called "Half a Million of Money."* Its hero, Saxon Trefalden, is a young man, the heir to an enormous fortune, who has been brought up in a very rude and simple fashion in a Swiss valley by his uncle and guardian, a man of austere religious principles; just as Lothair "was brought up in the Highlands with a rather savage uncle." At twenty young Trefalden is utterly ignorant of the ways of the world, and of the use and value of money. Of Lothair it is said, at the same age: "It is curious that his first dinner at Brentham was almost his first introduction into refined society. He had been a guest at the occasional banquets of his uncle; but these were festivals of the Picts and Scots; rude plenty and coarse splendour, with noise instead of conversation, and a tumult of obstructive dependents, who impeded by their want of skill the very convenience which they were purposed to facilitate." The Picts and Scots who welcomed Mr. Disraeli to Edinburgh evidently impressed him favourably. As Saxon Trefalden approaches the period when he will inherit his vast fortune, he falls simultaneously under two opposite influences-that of his kinsman William Trefalden, a keen and unscrupulous London lawyer, and that of Olimpia Colonna, a Roman lady of marvellous beauty, and a fanatical propagandist of the Revolution. Let us compare Miss Edwards's description of this lady, who is occasionally called by her worshippers " Santa Olimpia," with Mr. Disraeli's description of the "divine Theodora."

* "Half a Million of Money." A novel. By Amelia B. Edwards, author of "Barbara's History," etc. etc. London: Tinsley Brothers.