He was never a gambler. One of the most striking passages of _Vivian Grey_ gives the story--which would make a strong play--of a man in high place, led on by even noble motives to game, until he sharped at play, and was rescued from disgrace by friendship; and in _The Young Duke_ is the thrilling romance of the career of the founder of Crockford’s. The Macaronis were replaced by the Beaux; the Beaux in their turn by the more florid Dandies; until, at last, in the ’seventies, appeared the “Swells,” the heavy, if grand, Blunderbores, sworn to bachelor indulgence, who thought that “every woman should marry, but no man,” the exception only being if a girl sprang from “an affectionate family, with good shooting and first-rate claret.” Disraeli was interested in the “swells.” In a measure he had created them, because he had reconciled the people to the nobles, and the “swell” was a term embodying the people’s homage. But in this phase Disraeli saw something comic and barbaric. “St. Aldegonde,” himself a gigantic “swell,” could not bear the “swells.” When he met them he described them as “a social jungle in which there was a great herd of animals.” And with the “swells” began something of that “free-and-easiness” which hails from modern Columbia, and has now leavened society with its licence and its slang. “Free-and-easiness is all very well,” once laughed Disraeli to a friend, “but why not be a little freer and a little less easy?” “His spirit,” he says of “Coningsby,” “recoiled from that gross familiarity that is the characteristic of modern manners, and which would destroy all forms and ceremonies, merely because they curb and control their own coarse convenience and ill-disguised selfishness.” With the “swells” came also another social change--the diffusion not only of wealth, but of taste. A great lady assures “Lothair” that he will be surprised to see so many well-dressed and good-looking people at the opera, that he never beheld before.