Political society pervades all Disraeli’s novels. Only two phases of it need here be mentioned. The tiny coteries who dine together twice a week and “think themselves a party.” They appear in _Sybil_; they reappear in _Endymion_. And the breakfast gatherings of the ’forties, peculiar, as Disraeli noted, to Liberals. “It shows a restless, revolutionary mind,” mocks “Lady Firebrace,” “that can settle to nothing, but must be running after gossip the moment they are awake.” But two sayings, not directly with regard to society, may in this connection, however, be recorded. Both are from _The Young Duke_. “... He was always offended and always offending. Such a man could never succeed as a politician--a character who, of all others, must learn to endure, to forget, and to forgive.” The second was prophetic: “One thing is clear--that a man may speak very well in the House of Commons and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite. I intend in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both. In the Lower House, ‘Don Juan’ may perhaps be our model; in the Upper House, ‘Paradise Lost.’” As for club existence, the “lounging, languid men who spend their time in crossing from Brooks’s to Boodle’s and from Boodle’s to Brooks’s,” has he not characterised “those middle-aged nameless gentlemen of easy circumstances, who haunt clubs and dine a great deal at each others’ houses and chambers; men who travel regularly a little, and gossip regularly a great deal; who lead a sort of facile, slipshod existence, doing nothing, yet mightily interested in what others do; _great critics of little things_ ... peering through the window of a club-house as if they were discovering a planet”? And as for civic hospitality, he sums it up best, perhaps, in the _Endymion_ epigram: “Turtle makes all men equal.”