Those were the days when Disraeli, a genius whom no one treated seriously, was uttering his inmost thoughts through the medium of romances to which fancy contributed at least as much as fact. Then came twenty years of constant activity in politics--that pursuit which, as Bacon says, is of all pursuits "the most immersed in matter,"--and, when next he took up the novelist's pen, he was a much older and more experienced, though he would scarcely be a wiser, man. In 1870 he startled the world with "Lothair"; and those who had the hardihood to fight their way through all the fashionable flummery with which the book begins found in the second and third volumes a profoundly interesting contribution to the history of Europe between 1848 and 1868. One of the characters says that "the only strong things in Europe are the Church and the Secret Societies"; and the book is a vivid narrative of the struggle for life and death between the Temporal Power of the Papacy and the insurrectionary movements inspired by Garibaldi. Every chapter of the book contains a portrait, and every incident is drawn from something which had come under the author's notice between 1866 and 1869, when he was the leading personage in the Tory Government and the Fenians were making open and secret war on English rule. He was describing the men whom he knew and the things which he had seen, and this fact makes the book so extraordinarily vivid, and won for it Froude's enthusiastic praise. Every one could recognize Capel and Manning and Antonelli and Lord Bute, and all their diplomatic and fashionable allies; it required some knowledge of the insurrectionary movements to see in "Captain Bruges" a portrait of General Cluseret, commander-in-chief of every insurgent army in Europe or America, or in Theodora the noble character of Jessie White-Mario, whose career of romantic devotion to the cause of Freedom closed only in this year.[3] [3] 1906.