could be influenced by a greater desire of knowledge, a greater passion for the beautiful, or a deeper regard for his fellow-creatures.... I want no false fame. It would be no delight to me to be considered a prophet, were I conscious of being an impostor. I ever wish to be undeceived; but if I possess the organisation of a poet, no one can prevent me from exercising my faculty, any more than he can rob the courser of his fleetness, or the nightingale of her song.” The “ill-regulated will,” “the undercurrent of feelings he was then unable to express,” portrayed in _Vivian Grey_, developed into the higher and more elevating purposes of which his transforming imagination was all along capable. That very book contained the germs of what its composition revealed to his own mind--that out of a young adventurer with purpose and genius, the school of life forms a strong character and a great man. In _Contarini Fleming_ the irresistible power of predisposition, the hollowness of a nurture which ignores it and substitutes “words” for “ideas,” the interactions of imagination and experience, the fatuity of contradicting or overstraining Nature, are pursued; nor, as regards this novel, should it be forgotten that in some portions of its analysis there are traces in allusive undertone to the fatalities of the great and stricken Dean of St. Patrick’s.[9] In Disraeli’s case, as so often before him, “the dreaming part of mankind” has “prevailed over the waking.” His flouted dreams came true. They still hold sway. To give effectual substance to these higher and abiding dreams, those other dreams of ascendency, through which alone his will could realise his ideas, were also verified. “It is the will”--he speaks by the lips of the young “Alroy”--“that is father to the deed, and he who broods over some long idea, however wild, will find his dream was but the prophecy of coming fate.” “All is ordained,” he had said as a stripling, “yet man is master of his own actions.”[10] Disraeli’s career was itself a romance--a romance of the will that defies circumstance, and moulds the soil where ideas are to flourish. An inward, personal energy is the parent of faith, and faith in oneself is the sole security for the issue of faith among others. He lived to triumph, but not in order to triumph; and he remains a standing protest against those who believe in cliques and disbelieve in personal influence. The former are only compact in appearance; they are unsympathetic associations, welded together by interest alone. Joint-stock enterprise is not fellowship, and the test of direction is liability. Nor is it without significance that “Fortune,” even in the ancient world a real though blind goddess, has come, in the modern, to mean little more than cash; so that capital leans away from labour, plutocracy is cemented, solidarity declines, and worth too often is resolved by the question, “Worth how much?”