He was tender-hearted as a man, however sardonic as a politician.  He had seen and felt the condition of the people in 1844.  It was a time of cruel suffering which also stirred the spirits of Carlyle, Mill, Cobden, and Bright.  It led to the new Radicalism of which Mr. Gladstone and Mr. John Morley are eminent types.  But the genius of Disraeli saw that it might also become the foundation of a new Toryism; and Sybil was the first public manifesto of the new departure.  The political history of the last fifty years is evidence of his insight that, to recover their political ascendancy, a Conservative Party must take in hand “the condition of the people,” under the leadership of “a generous aristocracy,” and in alliance with a renovated Church.  These are the ideas of Sybil, though in the novel they are adumbrated in a dim and fantastic way.  As a romance, Sybil is certainly inferior to Coningsby.  As a political manifesto, it has had an almost greater success, and the movement that it launched is far from exhausted even yet.  One of Disraeli’s comrades in the new programme of 1844-5 was a member of the last Conservative cabinet.  And when we consider all the phases of Tory Democracy, Socialistic Toryism, and the current type of Christian Socialism, we may come to regard the ideas propounded in Sybil as not quite so visionary as they appeared to the Whigs, Radicals, Free Traders, and Benthamites of fifty years ago.

In Lothair, which did not appear until twenty-five years after Sybil, we find an altered and more mellow tone, as of a man who was playing with his own puppets, and had no longer any startling theories to propound or political objects to win.  For this reason it is in some ways the most complete and artistic of Disraeli’s romances.  The plot is not suspended by historical disquisitions on the origin of the Whig oligarchy, by pictures of the House of Commons that must weary those who know nothing about it, and by enthusiastic appeals to the younger aristocracy to rouse itself and take in hand the condition of the people.  In 1870, Mr. Disraeli had little hope of realising his earlier visions, and he did not write Lothair to preach a political creed.  The tale is that he avowed three motives, the first to occupy his mind on his fall from power, the second to make a large sum which he much needed, and the third to paint the manners of the highest order of rank and wealth, of which he alone amongst novelists had intimate knowledge.  That is exactly what we see in Lothair.  It is airy, fantastic, pure, graceful, and extravagant.  The whole thing goes to bright music, like a comic opera of Gilbert and Sullivan.  There is life and movement; but it is a scenic and burlesque life.  There is wit, criticism, and caricature;, but it does not cut deep, and it is neither hot nor fierce.  There is some pleasant tom-foolery; but at a comic opera we enjoy this graceful nonsense.  We see in every page