This is true of Disraeli. Long before he entered public life, before he knew the inimitable D’Orsay, or even the luminous Lyndhurst, before his most happy marriage, he had entered society at both doors--the gate of horn and the gate of ivory. As a stripling of twenty he had been sent, as we have seen, by Murray, the founder of his own fortune on Byron’s fortune and misfortunes, to Abbotsford and Sir Walter Scott. The young Disraeli used to dub Murray “the Emperor.” Murray described him as the most remarkable young man he had ever met; “a deep thinker but thoroughly practical in his ideas,” at once brilliant and solid, of a bright and airy disposition which endeared him to the young, and, himself unspoilt as “a child;” singularly happy in his home relations, and “his father is my oldest friend.” That father was himself a singular and remarkable man, who had attracted a distinguished coterie. He was Pye’s early intimate and Thomas Baring’s friend. His ties with Penn cemented his love of Buckinghamshire. He was familiar with Southey, and he knew Mrs. Siddons. He conversed with Samuel Rogers[144] and Tom Moore; he had corresponded and dined with Byron, of whom “Disraeli the Younger” has recorded some striking traits. He knew all the men of quills and letters, including the antiquarian Bliss and Douce, many of the wits, and some of the “wit-woulds.” His own brother-in-law, George Basevi, was an eminent architect,[145] and architecture is often touched in the son’s novels.[146] Another member of the family was a conveyancer, and through him the son was first sent to read law with a solicitor, in whose office he read Chaucer, and was then entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He had artistic acquaintances also. Barry, he knew well. Downman painted his wife, and Downman’s brother was his associate. And there were also some men of affairs who visited Isaac Disraeli’s house. The burrowing and irrepressible Croker, afterwards so mercilessly satirised as “Rigby,”[147] and equally trounced, poor man, by Thackeray and Macaulay, seems to have been his occasional purveyor of politics. But for contemporary parties he cared little. He was a solitary student of the past; excavating ancient manuscripts in the British Museum when the daily number of such scholars did not exceed six. He was shy, meditative, dreamy, and dispassionate. But he was poet besides recluse; his earliest courtship, while Dr. Johnson lay dying, had been that of the muse. Sir Walter Scott included one of his lyrics in a published collection.[148] He diversified his stern by lighter labours, and his novels, long since moldered, caused some stir and attracted sympathy. After the romance of his early failures and the surprise of his early success, he set himself patiently down to work for ten years before he would print another line. His own father, who never understood but always humored him, was a man of business, sanguine and prompt, yet gay and