Selwyn exclaim when a great nobleman’s golden dinner-service was up to auction--“Lord, how many toads have eaten off this plate!” “Among the habitual dwellers” (this from _Coningsby_) “in these delicate halls there was a tacit understanding, a prevalent doctrine, that required no formal exposition, no proofs and illustrations, no comment, and no gloss, which was, indeed, rather a traditional conviction than an impartial dogma--that the exoteric public were, on many subjects, the victims of very vulgar prejudice, which these enlightened personages wished neither to disturb nor to adopt.” “Society,” he said, alluding to its treatment of Byron in _Venetia_, “is all passions and no heart.” In _Vivian Grey_ (as to the circumstances of which I shall say something in my last chapter) the father (that is, Disraeli’s father) thus admonishes the boyish son. “... You are now inspecting one of the worst portions of society in what is called the great world (St. Giles’ is bad, but of another kind), and it may be useful, on the principle that the actual sight of brutal ebriety was supposed to have inspired youth with the virtue of temperance.... Let me warn you not to fall into the usual error of youth, in fancying that the circle you move in is precisely the world itself. Do not imagine that there are not other beings, whose benevolent principle is governed by finer sympathies, and by those nobler emotions which really constitute all our public and private virtues. I give you this hint, lest, in your present society, you might suppose these virtues were merely historical.” Speaking of “Vivian Grey” under the guise of “Contarini Fleming’s” first novel, Disraeli makes his hero ejaculate: “All the bitterness of my heart, occasioned by my wretched existence among their false circles, found its full vent. Never was anything so imprudent. Everybody figured, and all parties and opinions alike suffered.” Still more did he despise “the insolence of the insignificant.”