He was born at the parting of the ways. His early reading, and, indeed, his cast of mind, were steeped in the style of the eighteenth century; but the movements of the nineteenth, the significance of the French Revolution and of Napoleon, who had made all things new, simmered in him from the first, and his earliest reflections were how to attune the democratic idea to the vital institutions of an ancient empire. As regards his home, he was truly, as he has put it, “born in a library;” and this circumstance contributed as much as others to a certain detachment of thought which in politics afforded him the clue to the character of movements, and, above all, to the movements of character; in fiction, as will be apparent from my ninth chapter, it led him to regard things as they appeared of themselves, and not always as they seemed to others; while under the play of fancy he transposed their outward environments to accentuate their essence. Of his father, himself a most interesting study, I shall have more to say in my eighth chapter. Here, I only wish to draw attention to the fact that Isaac Disraeli’s influence on his son’s ideas was twofold. On the one hand, his views on “predisposition,” on the use of solitude, on the true meaning of education, on historical “cause and pretext,” on the hollowness of “joint-stock felicity,” on the self-recognition of creative minds before their late acknowledgment by contemporaries, with others glanced at in my later chapters, were directly derived by Disraeli from his father. From him, too, he inherited his fondness for Burke. On the other hand, Disraeli’s native leanings reacted against many of that peripatetic philosopher’s opinions. His interpretation of the Bible was, if not at variance with, at any rate different from his father’s,[43] and was, I fancy, shared by his sister. His admiration for Bolingbroke, as genius and constitutional interpreter, was in direct opposition, just as that father’s own dispassionate outlook remained independent and often the reverse of his own early associations. Byron, however, entered Disraeli’s mental being through his father; and of three main influences on his boyhood--the Bible, Bolingbroke, and Byron (strange conjunction!), the last was not the least.