[12] After he had been articled to a firm of solicitors at seventeen, and eventually called to the bar, his father had wished him to enter a government office. Cf. Mr. Lake’s “Reminiscences.”
[13] Cf. p. 254.
[14] It treated of a hero outlawed under the Alien Act by a Ministry resenting a poem (cf. Smiles’ “Memoirs of John Murray”). Disraeli had also edited a “history” of Paul Jones. Of his early American pamphlet, I speak later on. A Mr. Powles—“something in the city”—was concerned in assisting both this and the Representative.
[15] Of Keats it sings—
“Who grasped the Theban shell and struck a tone,
No master yet had wakened—save its own.”
[16] It succeeded a respectable pro-Canning and pro-Queen-Caroline weekly, to which Disraeli seems to have contributed as a lad also. Its foundation brought him to Sir Walter Scott, and to Lockhart, who at first disdained to be “editor,” but melted when Disraeli assured him that he would be “Director-general” of a controlling organ. Only a temporary breach with Murray was caused by Disraeli’s speedy withdrawal from the concern. But for Lockhart, as a “tenth-rate novelist,” Disraeli expressed contempt in 1833, when he proposed to write for the Edinburgh, presided over by Napier. Cf. British Museum, Add. MS. 34,616, f. 45.
[17] This is no imaginary picture. Cf. Isaac Disraeli’s letters in the British Museum, Add. MS. 34,571, ff. 94, 96. Bradenham Manor, now the residence of my friend, Mr. Graves, had been under Queen Anne the seat of the Earl of Strafford through his marriage with a City heiress.
[18] In a future chapter I shall revert to this episode, which Disraeli ever deplored. His valet, in bachelor days, at 35, Duke Street, St. James—one Whittlestone, like Disraeli’s servant in the East, Byron’s Tita, provided for as attendant in a government office by his master—used to retail many scraps of such gossip. The young Disraeli’s novels, he averred, were written in bed. Heroes truly should dispense with valets.
[19] In The Press (1853–59)—which vies with Swift in the Examiner and Bolingbroke in the Craftsman, and to which Lord Derby and Shirley Brooks also contributed—Disraeli finely characterises Chatham as “a forest oak in a suburban garden.”
[20] Of this virtue, singled out with domestic purity by Gladstone for praise in Disraeli, the late Lady J. Manners wrote, “He feared nobody but God.” In my eighth chapter I shall quote Jowett’s verdict.