But so did Fielding, so did Swift, and Defoe, and Goldsmith.  Writers are to be judged by their best; and it does not matter so very much if that best is little in bulk.  Disraeli’s social and political satires have a peculiar and rare flavour of their own, charged with an insight and a vein of wit such as no other man perhaps in this century has touched—­so that, even though they be thrown off in sketches and sometimes in mere jeux d’esprit, they bring him into the company of Swift, Voltaire, and Montesquieu.  He is certainly inferior to all these mighty satirists both in wit and passion, and also in definite purpose.  But he has touches of their lightning-flash irradiating contemporary society.  And it seems a pity that the famous Men of Letters series which admits (and rightly admits) Hawthorne and De Quincey, could find no room for the author of Ixion in Heaven, The Infernal Marriage, Coningsby, and Lothair.

Disraeli’s literary reputation has suffered much in England by the unfortunate circumstance of his having been the leader of a political party.  As the chief of a powerful party which he transformed with amazing audacity, as the victorious destroyer of the old Whig oligarchy and the founder of the new Tory democracy, as a man of Jewish birth and alien race, as a man to whom satire was the normal weapon and bombastic affectation a deliberate expedient for dazzling the weak—­Disraeli, even in his writings, has been exposed in England to a bitter system of disparagement which blinds partisans to their real literary merit.  His political opponents, and they are many and savage, can see little to admire in his strange romances:  his political worshippers and followers, who took him seriously as a great statesman, are not fond of imagining their hero as an airy satirist.  His romances as well as his satires are wholly unlike anything English; and though he had brilliant literary powers, he never acquired any serious literary education.  Much as he had read, he had no learning, and no systematic knowledge of any kind.  He was never, strictly speaking, even an accurate master of literary English.  He would slip, as it were, unconsciously, into foreign idioms and obsolete words.  In America, where his name arouses no political prejudice, he is better judged.  To the Englishman, at least to the pedant, he is still a somewhat elaborate jest.

Let us put aside every bias of political sympathy and anything that we know or suspect of the nature of the man, and we may find in the writer, Benjamin Disraeli, certain very rare qualities which justify his immense popularity in America, and which ought to maintain it in England.  In his preface to Lothair (October 1870), he proudly said that it had been “more extensively read both by the people of the United Kingdom and the United States than any work that has appeared for the last half century.”  This singular popularity must