Disraeli had a passion for early youth, and in almost all his books he dwells lovingly upon its characteristics. It is particularly in _Contarini Fleming_ and in _Coningsby_--that is to say, in the best novels of his first and of his second period--that he lingers over the picture of schoolboy life with tenderness and sympathy. We have only to compare them, however, to see how great an advance he had made in ten years in his power of depicting such scenes. The childish dreams of Contarini are unchecked romance, and though the friendship with Musæus is drawn with delicacy and insight, and though that is an extremely pretty scene where Christiana soothes the pride of Contarini, yet a manliness and a reality are missing which we find in the wonderful Eton scenes of _Coningsby_. Disraeli's comprehension of the feelings of half-grown ambitious boys of good family was extraordinary, and when we consider that he had never been to a public school, his picture of the life and conversation at Eton is remarkable for its fidelity to nature. The relation of the elder schoolboys to one another--a theme to which he was fond of recurring--is treated in a very adroit and natural spirit, not without a certain Dorian beauty. This preoccupation with the sentiments and passions of schoolboys was rather crudely found fault with at the time. We need have no difficulty in comprehending the pleasure he felt in watching the expansion of those youthful minds from whom he hoped for all that was to make England wise and free. The account of Coningsby's last night at Eton is one of the most deeply felt pages which Disraeli ever composed, and here it may be said that the careful avoidance of all humour--an act of self-denial which a smaller writer would not have been capable of--is justified by the dignified success of a very dangerous experiment.