umstances in which he finds
himself, as well as on his gift for judging of them. He may become a
Napoleon. He may fall in a premature collision with forces which
want of sympathy has prevented him from estimating.

In some of his novels, and most fully in the first of them, Mr.
Disraeli sketched a character and foreshadowed a career not altogether
unlike that which has just been indicated. It would be unfair to treat
as autobiographical, though some of his critics have done so, the
picture of Vivian Grey. What that singular book shows is that, at an
age when his contemporaries were lads at college, absorbed in cricket
matches or Latin verse-making, Disraeli had already meditated
profoundly on the conditions and methods of worldly success, had
rejected the allurements of pleasure and the attractions of
literature, as well as the ideal life of philosophy, had conceived of
a character isolated, ambitious, intense, resolute, untrammelled by
scruples, who moulds men to his purposes by the sheer force of his
intellect, humouring their foibles, using their weaknesses, and luring
them into his chosen path by the bait of self-interest.

To lay stress on the fact that Mr. Disraeli was of Hebrew birth is
not, though some of his political antagonists stooped so to use it, to
cast any reproach upon him: it is only to note a fact of the utmost
importance for a proper comprehension of his position. The Jews were
at the beginning of the nineteenth century still foreigners in
England, not only on account of their religion, with its mass of
ancient rites and usages, but also because they were filled with the
memory of centuries of persecution, and perceived that in some parts
of Europe the old spirit of hatred had not died out. The antiquity of
their race, their sense of its long-suffering and isolation, their
pride in the intellectual achievements of those ancestors whose blood,
not largely mixed with that of any other race, flows in their veins,
lead the stronger or more reflective spirits to revenge themselves by
a kind of scorn upon the upstart Western peoples among whom their lot
is cast. The mockery one finds in Heinrich Heine could not have come
from a Teuton. Even while imitating, as the wealthier of them have
latterly begun to imitate, the manners and luxury of those nominal
Christians among whom they live, they retain their feeling of
detachment, and are apt to regard with a coldly observant curiosity
the beliefs, prejudices,