Statesmen, poets, fine ladies, were all genuinely amused; and the author bade fair to become a lion, when he fell ill, and was compelled to leave England for a year or more, which he spent in travel on the Continent and in Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine.  His visit to the birthplace of his race made an impression on him that lasted through his life and literature.  It is embodied in his ‘Letters to His Sister’ (London, 1843), and the autobiographical novel ‘Contarini Fleming’ (1833), in which he turned his adventures into fervid English, at a guinea a volume.  But although the spirit of poesy, in the form of a Childe Harold, stalks rampant through the romance, there is both feeling and fidelity to nature whenever he describes the Orient and its people.  Then the bizarre, brilliant poseur forgets his role, and reveals his highest aspirations.

When Disraeli returned to London he became the fashion.  Everybody, from the prime minister to Count D’Orsay, had read his clever novels.  The poets praised them, Lady Blessington invited him to dine, Sir Robert Peel was “most gracious.”

But literary success could never satisfy Disraeli’s ambition:  a seat in Parliament was at the end of his rainbow.  He professed himself a radical, but he was a radical in his own sense of the term; and like his own Sidonia, half foreigner, half looker-on, he felt himself endowed with an insight only possible to, an outsider, an observer without inherited prepossessions.

Several contemporary sketches of Disraeli at this time have been preserved.  His dress was purposed affectation; it led the beholder to look for folly only:  and when the brilliant flash came, it was the more startling as unexpected from such a figure.  Lady Dufferin told Mr. Motley that when she met Disraeli at dinner, he wore a black-velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several rings outside, and long black ringlets rippling down his shoulders.  She told him he had made a fool of himself by appearing in such a dress, but she did not guess why it had been adopted.  Another contemporary says of him, “When duly excited, his command of language was wonderful, his power of sarcasm unsurpassed.”

He was busy making speeches and writing political squibs for the next two years; for Parliament was before his eyes.  “He knew,” says Froude, “he had a devil of a tongue, and was unincumbered by the foolish form of vanity called modesty.”  ‘Ixion in Heaven,’ ‘The Infernal Marriage,’ and ‘Popanilla’ were attempts to rival both Lucian and Swift on their own ground.  It is doubtful, however, whether he would have risked writing ‘Henrietta Temple’ (1837) and ‘Venetia’ (1837), two ardent love stories, had he not been in debt; for notoriety as a novelist is not always a recommendation to a constituency.

In ‘Henrietta’ he found an opportunity to write the biography of a lover oppressed by duns.  It is a most entertaining novel even to a reader who does not read for a new light on the great statesman, and is remarkable as the beginning of what is now known as the “natural” manner; a revolt, his admirers tell us, from the stilted fashion of making love that then prevailed in novels.