_Tancred_ is introduced by an epic of the _chefs_. Prevost is discoursing to Leander (who will take no engagements but with crowned heads), of their profession and of Adrien, a neophyte:[186] “‘It is something to have served under Napoleon,’ added Prevost, with the grand air of the Imperial kitchen. ‘Had it not been for Waterloo, I should have had the cross. But the Bourbons and the cooks of the Empire never could understand each other. * * * “‘He is too young. I took him to Hellingsley, and he lost his head on the third day. I entrusted the souffles to him, and, but for the most desperate personal exertions all would have been lost. It was an affair of the bridge of Areola. * * * Ah! _mon Dieu!_ those are moments!’” Later the same functionary is scandalized at the diners’ neglect of his colleague (shown in the failure to present him with tokens of esteem) when he had surpassed himself in a superb dinner:[187] “How can he compose when he is not appreciated? Had he been appreciated he would today not only have repeated the _escalopes a la Bellamont_, but perhaps even invented what might have outdone it. * * * These things in themselves are nothing; but they prove to a man of genius that he is understood. Had Leander been in the Imperial kitchen, or even with the emperor of Russia, he would have been decorated!” It transpires, however, that the artist’s wounded feelings were soothed by a belated acknowledgment, accompanied by a tactful hint that he suffered in a good cause, and that as an esthetic missionary he should be lenient to the social delinquencies of the barbarians he ministered unto:[188] “Was it nothing, by this development of taste, to assist in supporting that aristocratic influence which he wished to cherish, and which can alone encourage art?” It is not to be supposed that this indicates the range of Disraeli’s ideas, merely the subject on which he chiefly expends his ironic persiflage. A representative example of his more serious sarcasm is found in the second volume of his Young England Trilogy, the one most alive with social sympathy:[189] “Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England as it is on the banks of the Ganges; a circumstance which apparently has not yet engaged the attention of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.” In Dickens and Trollope irony is a substantial though not exactly an integral element; more substantial in the former than the latter. We find ironic comment both direct, by the writer, and indirect, through ironic characters; and the still more indirect, in the betraying speech that relates facts true in a different sense from that meant by the speaker, thus conveying a reverse effect from the one intended. A text for the first kind is furnished by Noah Claypole, the sordid bully and snob, prompt to retaliate on one still lower in the scale of circumstance than himself:[190]