Benjamin, like most Jewish youths, was educated in private schools, and at seventeen entered a solicitor's office. At twenty-two he published 'Vivian Grey' (London, 1826), which readable and amusing take-off of London society gave him great and instantaneous notoriety. Its minute descriptions of the great world, its caricatures of well-known social and political personages, its magnificent diction,--too magnificent to be taken quite seriously,--excited inquiry; and the great world was amazed to discover that the impertinent observer was not one of themselves, but a boy in a lawyer's office. To add to the audacity, he had conceived himself the hero of these diverting situations, and by his cleverness had outwitted age, beauty, rank, diplomacy itself. Statesmen, poets, fine ladies, were all genuinely amused; and the author bade fair to become a lion, when he fell ill, and was compelled to leave England for a year or more, which he spent in travel on the Continent and in Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine. His visit to the birthplace of his race made an impression on him that lasted through his life and literature. It is embodied in his 'Letters to His Sister' (London, 1843), and the autobiographical novel 'Contarini Fleming' (1833), in which he turned his adventures into fervid English, at a guinea a volume. But although the spirit of poesy, in the form of a Childe Harold, stalks rampant through the romance, there is both feeling and fidelity to nature whenever he describes the Orient and its people. Then the bizarre, brilliant _poseur_ forgets his rôle, and reveals his highest aspirations. When Disraeli returned to London he became the fashion. Everybody, from the prime minister to Count D'Orsay, had read his clever novels. The poets praised them, Lady Blessington invited him to dine, Sir Robert Peel was "most gracious." But literary success could never satisfy Disraeli's ambition: a seat in Parliament was at the end of his rainbow. He professed himself a radical, but he was a radical in his own sense of the term; and like his own Sidonia, half foreigner, half looker-on, he felt himself endowed with an insight only possible to, an outsider, an observer without inherited prepossessions.