“... The gentlemen of the smoking-room have it not all their own way quite as much as they think. If, indeed, a new school of Athens were to be pictured, the sages and the students might be represented in exquisite dressing-gowns, with slippers rarer than the lost one of Cinderella, and brandishing beautiful brushes over tresses still more fair. Then is the time when characters are never more finely drawn, or difficult social questions more accurately solved; knowledge without reasoning, and truth without logic--the triumph of intuition! But we must not profane the mysteries of Bona Dea.” To women, moreover, he, like “Coningsby,” “instinctively bowed as to beings set apart for reverence and delicate treatment,” but disillusions chequered his experience. In maturity he could undoubtedly “conceive that there were any other women in the world than fair Geraldines and Countesses of Pembroke.” While Lord Randolph Churchill was still alive, a young man--now an eminent Liberal statesman, and then in the thick of a passionate courtship--poured out his heart to him as they walked home together from the House. Lord Randolph reminded him of what Disraeli had once observed to himself, that two of the great elements in life were passion and power; that in youth the first prevailed, but that, as years proceeded, the last proved incomparable. He once said in his early youth that most of the distinguished men of his acquaintance who had married “for love” bullied or maltreated their wives; and he also remarked at an early period that the man who wishes to rule mankind must not marry a too beautiful wife, who would divide his time and his will. Long afterwards, in the devotion of his home, Mrs. Disraeli would rally him by saying, “You know you married me for money, and I know that now, if you had to do it again, you would marry me for love.” It will be recalled, too, that “Sidonia,” though he had a heart, indulged his deeper emotions more towards causes than individuals. “In his organisation there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency.” And yet Disraeli wrote: “We know not how it is, but love at first sight is a subject of constant ridicule, but somehow we suspect that it has more to do with the affairs of this world than the world is willing to own.”--“Where we do not respect, we soon cease to love; when we cease to love, virtue weeps and flies.” I think that real love as the base of marriage is more genuinely, as well as romantically, portrayed in _Venetia_ that in any of his works. In those pages it really moves us instead of moving before us, as it often does, even in the “love story” of _Henrietta Temple_. One of his early hobbies, too, was that men ought to marry early, as a source of strength and simplicity both to the affections and to the race. This is emphasised in _Contarini Fleming_. The passage is striking, and illustrates his deeper ideas on the whole subject: “To a man who is in