“... We are not of those who set themselves against the verdict of society, or ever omit to expedite, by a gentle kick, a falling friend. And yet, when we just remember beauty is beauty, and grace is grace, and kindness is kindness, although the beautiful, the graceful, and the amiable do get in a scrape, we don’t know how it is, we confess it is a weakness, but, under these circumstances, we do not feel quite inclined to sneer. But this is wrong. We should not pity or pardon those who have yielded to great temptation, or, perchance, great provocation. Besides, it is right that our sympathies should be kept for the injured.” Endeavour and individuality he reverenced and recognised. Tact, the charity of manners, he admired.[161] But for aimlessness, whether callous or random, whether patrician or plebeian--whether of “Lord Marney,” who said to “Egremont,” “I am your elder brother, sir, whose relationship to you is your only claim to the consideration of society,” and was answered, “A curse on the society that has fashioned such claims ... founded on selfishness, cruelty, and fraud, and leading to demoralisation, misery, and crime;” or of “Rigby,” who called his record in Debrett of the marriage successfully schemed for his patron, “a great fact.” To such as these he gave no quarter; and he scalped them with a wit and an irony that has rarely been equalled. And he loved startling contrasts. “Whatever they did,” he says in _The Infernal Marriage_, “the Elysians were careful never to be vehement.” Disraeli liked to break the monotone of society’s polished surface by pronounced and original types of race, of class, of passion, of enterprise; the Roman among the European-Americans, the Arabian, the Syrian, the Greek, the Gaul among the Franks. He revelled in romantic women, muses, or prophetesses, who lead forlorn movements, or rally broken fortunes; in men whom they cheer and kindle; in public spirits; in sudden and unexpected revolutions of fortune, and sudden and unforeseen revelations of character. To himself in his first youth might adhere the phrase with which he then labelled “Popanilla:” “He looked the most dandified of savages, and the most savage of dandies.” He liked to pit the Bohemian against the noble, and the valet against the hero; the “light children of dance and song” against their heavy patrons; to display the power of career even in the lodginghouse-keeper’s daughter; to depict the aristocracy of the master working man; to analyse and contrast the ironies of the struggle, the social tragedy of illusion, and the social farce of fashion. “... ‘Your mind is opening, Ixion,’” says Mercury, in that brilliant skit which Disraeli penned before he was celebrated; “‘you will soon be a man of the world. To the left, and keep clear of that star’--‘Who lives there?’--‘The Fates know, not I. Some low people who are trying to shine into notice. ’Tis a parvenu planet, and only sprung up into space within this century.