In his old age he was once driving past Bradenham with a lady who knew how happy his home relations had been. “Ah!” he sighed, “there is where I passed my miserable youth.”--“Miserable!” she replied; “impossible! Surely you were happy there.”--“Not then. I was devoured by an irresistible ambition which I could not gratify.”[186] It reminds me of that passage in Swift where the great dean ascribes the first pricks of ambition, in the career which the inequalities of his situation had urged, to the rage and mortification he experienced as a boy in failing to land a big fish. He grew distracted; for a time he had to inhabit a darkened room. With the Austins he travelled in Germany and Italy. The result was _Vivian Grey_--the “Don Juan” of politics. The circumstances and results of the book I have touched in the preceding chapter. Disraeli grew ashamed of its fashionable success. The world was not merely his oyster. He would elevate and benefit by it. He mixed in society, but it neither raised his spirits nor slaked his thirst, although it did help him to see his measure and stature among mankind. That commerce with the world is the best cure for misjudged ambition he pressed in his fine address to youth at the Manchester Athenæum; but ambition itself he regarded as elevating for man. At the crisis, however, that we have reached, his ambitions were still unsettled. He began to be soured and sceptical both of himself, of mankind, and of God. His spiritual fibre was shaken. His sister, with talents nearly equal to his, and faith and charity superior, came to his rescue. She healed his wounds; she ennobled his standard; she comforted him with her entire belief in his great future. She restored him to his higher self. Once more the shadow of ill health fell across the young Disraeli’s footsteps; this time a very critical malady--a complete nervous breakdown. He “fainted as he dressed.” He even had convulsions. He was overwhelmed by strange noises in his head. “... The falls of Niagara could not overpower the infernal roaring that I alone heard.”[187] Travel was prescribed. He departed for two years from Europe, and mended. Even at this time, with the spectres of doubt and illness athwart his way, he could not stifle the secret assurance of his destiny. I have seen a letter to a friend, who had shared a financial misadventure, in which he deplores his condition, but declares that “something within me whispers that one day I shall be famous. Be assured, if ever that time comes, you will be the first that I shall remember.” He returned, found his place, his mission, and his ideals. But still his discreet family opposed themselves to his entrance into public life. It was incredible, impossible, absurd. “So much for the maddest of mad acts, as my uncle said,” he wrote to his sister on his first return to Parliament.