I consider the book a very good one, in the sense of being valuable.  Whatever your mood may be, that of the moralist, cynic, satirist, humourist, whether you love, pity, or despise your fellow-man, here is grist for your mill.  It feeds the mind.

Although in form the book is but a stringing together of stories, incidents, and aphorisms, still the whole produces a distinct effect.  To state what that effect is would be, I suppose, the higher criticism.  It is not altogether disagreeable; it is decidedly amusing; it is clever and somewhat contemptible.  Sir William Fraser was a baronet who thought well of his order.  He desiderated a tribunal to determine the right to the title, and he opined that the courtesy prefix of ‘Honourable,’ which once, it appears, belonged to baronets, should be restored to them.  Apart from these opinions, ridiculous and peculiar, Sir William Fraser stands revealed in this volume as cast in a familiar mould.  The words ‘gentleman,’ ‘White’s,’ ‘Society,’ often flow from his pen, and we may be sure were engraven on his heart.  He had seen a world wrecked.  When he was young, so he tells his readers, the world consisted of at least three, and certainly not more than five, hundred persons who were accustomed night after night during the season to make their appearance at a certain number of houses, which are affectionately enumerated.  A new face at any one of these gatherings immediately attracted attention, as, indeed, it is easy to believe it would.  ‘Anything for a change,’ as somebody observes in Pickwick.

This is the atmosphere of the book, and Sir William breathes in it very pleasantly.  Endowed by Nature with a retentive memory and a literary taste, active if singular, he may be discovered in his own pages moving up and down, in and out of society, supplying and correcting quotations, and gratifying the vanity of distinguished authors by remembering their own writings better than they did themselves.  The book makes one clearly comprehend what a monstrous clever fellow the rank and file of the Tory party must have felt Sir William Fraser to be.  This, however, is only background.  In the front of the picture we have the mysterious outlines, the strange personality, struggling between the bizarre and the romantic, of ’the Jew,’ as big George Bentinck was ever accustomed to denominate his leader.  Sir William Fraser’s Disraeli is a very different figure from Sir Stafford Northcote’s.  The myth about the pocket Sophocles is rudely exploded.  Sir William is certain that Disraeli could not have construed a chapter of the Greek Testament.  He found such mythology as he required where many an honest fellow has found it before him—­in Lempriere’s Dictionary.  His French accent, as Sir William records it, was most satisfactory, and a conclusive proof of his bona-fides.  Disraeli, it is clear, cared as little for literature as he did for art.  He admired Gray, as every man with a sense for epithet must; he studied Junius, whose style, so Sir William Fraser believes, he surpassed in his ‘Runnymede’ letters.  Sir William Fraser kindly explains the etymology of this strange word ‘Runnymede,’ as he also does that of ‘Parliament,’ which he says is ‘Parliamo mente’ (Let us speak our minds).  Sir William clearly possessed the learning denied to his chief.