He felt all along that, after all, true society is at home, and not with “polished ruffians;” the “courtesy of the heart” was preferable to that “of the head.” “My idea of perfect society,” says “Lothair,” “is being married, as I propose, and paying visits to Brentham;” or, as Disraeli varies the theme in the same novel, “I am fond of society that pleases me, that is accomplished and natural and ingenious; otherwise I prefer being alone.” Home, he thought, should be the centre of society, and a homeless society was not one at all. It is very noticeable, in comparing present with past fiction, how the English sense of home and flicker of the fireside, which used to warm every page, has receded out of view before the motor-speed and nervous restlessness of the age. His home-fondness was touchingly displayed after the death of his wife by his reply to a friend, who asked if he were driving home--a reply accompanied by tears; “Home! I have no home _now_.” Nor did any great man ever reserve the sanctities of the hearth more completely from a prying public. The purity of his home affections was one of Mr. Gladstone’s notes of eulogy in the funeral oration that he delivered in the House to which Disraeli had been proudly devoted for forty-five long years. There are scores of sayings and episodes in his books, from _Vivian Grey_ downwards, regarding the home affections; many charming touches, too, in his letters to his sister. But I content myself with one, from _Venetia_-- “... After all, we have no friends that we can depend upon in this life but our parents.... All other intimacies, however ardent, are liable to cool; all other confidence, however limited, to be violated. In the phantasmagoria of life, the friend with whom we have cultivated mutual trust for years is often suddenly or gradually estranged from us, or becomes, from painful yet irresistible circumstances, even our deadliest foe. As for women ... the mistresses of our hearts, who has not learnt that the links of passion are fragile as they are glittering?... Where is the enamoured face that smiled upon our early love, and was to shed tears over our grave?... No wonder we grow callous, for how few have the opportunity of returning to the hearth which they quitted in levity or thoughtless weariness, yet which alone is faithful to them; whose sweet affections require not the stimulus of prosperity or fame, the lure of accomplishments or the tribute of flattery, but which are constant to us in distress, and console us even in disgrace!” I ought, perhaps, to add a word of Disraeli’s ideas on love and marriage. No one set more store by, or laid more store on, the deciding influence of woman on man’s career. No one recognised more heartily a woman’s instinctive superiority to logic. How good is the humour in that dressing-room scene of the ’seventies in _Lothair_:--