Disraeli, whose career paralleled Lytton’s in several ways, takes the same tone toward his own social environment, but his deeper political earnestness led him to criticise that environment in the wider as well as narrower social sense. In his first real novel we find the latter by itself, in such touches as this:[283] “Always in the best set, never flirting with the wrong man, and never speaking to the wrong woman, all agreed that the Ladies Saint Maurice had fairly won their coronets.” Again it appears in this account of the hero:[284] “The banquet was over: the Duke of Saint James passed his examination with unqualified approval; and having been stamped at the Mint of Fashion as a sovereign of the brightest die, he was flung forth, like the rest of his golden brethren, to corrupt the society of which he was the brightest ornament.” The house-party of the Dacres, a family of taste and high standards, is described negatively:[285] “* * * no duke who is a gourmand, no earl who is a jockey, no manœuvering mother, no flirting daughters, no gambling sons, for your entertainment, * * * As for buffoons and artists, to amuse a vacant hour or sketch a vacant face, we must frankly tell you at once that there is not one.” But from _Popanilla_ through the Trilogy the inanity and pretense of this social circle is made more pointed by contrast with those socially beneath it. Egremont’s experience with the plain people induces this serious indictment of his own set:[286] “It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth and depth and breadth; that it is always discussing persons instead of principles, * * * it is not merely that it has neither imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor feeling, nor knowledge, to recommend it, but * * * it is in short, trivial, uninteresting, stupid, really vulgar.” Thackeray also speaks from within, and has to his credit his great roster of Snobs, his panoramic Vanity Fair, and his imposing procession of worldly, heartless, noble old dames. Trollope prefers country life, but his Claverings, de Courcys, Luftons, and the Duke of Omnium, show that he has no desire to neglect its aristocracy. Dickens, on the other hand, loved London and its struggling poor, but in the Merdles, the Veneerings, and the Dorrits _redivivi_, he does what he can with the humors of the struggling rich. To Meredith the exasperating thing about polite society was its impoliteness,--its delight in gossip and scandal, its petty but venomous persecutions, and the false courtesy that takes refuge in conventionality. This impression apparently deepened with time, for it is glimpsed only in _Evan Harrington_ and _Sandra Belloni_, of the earlier books, but is entirely absent from none of the last half dozen.