He is usually inclined to make game of his reader, his subject, and even of himself; but he lets you see that he never forgets this, and never attempts to conceal it.  He is seldom dull, never sardonic or cruel, and always clean, healthy, and decent.  His heroines are ideal fairy queens, his heroes are all visionary and chivalrous nincompoops; and even, though we know that much of it is whimsical banter and nonsensical fancy, there is an air of refined extravaganza in these books which may continue to give them a lasting charm.

The short juvenile drolleries of his restless youth are the least defective as works of art; and, being brief and simple jeux d’esprit of a rare order, they are entirely successful and infinitely amusing. Ixion in Heaven, The Infernal Marriage, and Popanilla, are astonishing products of a lad of twenty-three, who knew nothing of English society, and who had had neither regular education nor social opportunities.  They have been compared with the social satirettes of Lucian, Swift, and Voltaire.  It is true they have not the fine touch and exquisite polish of the witty Greek of Samosata, nor the subtle irony of Voltaire and Montesquieu, nor the profound grasp of the Dean.  But they are full of wit, observation, sparkle, and fun.  The style is careless and even incorrect, but it is full of point and life.  The effects are rather stagey, and the smartness somewhat strained—­that is, if these boyish trifles are compared with Candide and the Lettres Persanes.  As pictures of English society, court, and manners in 1827 painted in fantastic apologues, they are most ingenious, and may be read again and again.  The Infernal Marriage, in the vein of the Dialogues of the Dead, is the most successful. Ixion is rather broader, simpler, and much more slight, but is full of boisterous fun. Popanilla, a more elaborate satire in direct imitation of Gulliver’s Travels, is neither so vivacious nor so easy as the smaller pieces, but it is full of wit and insight.  Nothing could give a raw Hebrew lad the sustained imagination and passion of Jonathan Swift; but there are few other masters of social satire with whom the young genius of twenty-three can be compared.  These three satires, which together do not fill 200 pages, are read and re-read by busy and learned men after nearly seventy years have passed.  And that is in itself a striking proof of their originality and force.

It is not fair to one who wrote under the conditions of Benjamin Disraeli to take any account of his inferior work:  we must judge him at his best.  He avowedly wrote many pot-boilers merely for money; he began to write simply to make the world talk about him, and he hardly cared what the world might say; and he not seldom wrote rank bombast in open contempt for his reader, apparently as if he had made a bet to ascertain how much stuff the British public would