The pursuit of fame and power, to which he gave all his efforts, is presented in his writings as the only alternative ideal to a life of pleasure; and he probably regarded those who pursued some other as either fools or weaklings. Early in his political life he said one night to Mr. Bright (from whom I heard the anecdote), as they took their umbrellas in the cloak-room of the House of Commons: "After all, what is it that brings you and me here? Fame! This is the true arena. I might have occupied a literary throne; but I have renounced it for this career." The external pomps and trappings of life, titles, stately houses and far-spreading parks, all those gauds and vanities with which sumptuous wealth surrounds itself, had throughout his life a singular fascination for him. He liked to mock at them in his novels, but they fascinated him none the less. One can understand how they might fire the imagination of an ambitious youth who saw them from a distance--might even retain their charm for one who was just struggling into the society which possessed them, and who desired to feel himself the equal of the possessors. It is stranger that, when he had harnessed the English aristocracy to his chariot, and was driving them where he pleased, he should have continued to admire such things. So, however, it was. There was even in him a vein of inordinate deference to rank and wealth which would in a less eminent person have been called snobbishness. In his will he directs that his estate of Hughenden Manor, in Buckinghamshire, shall pass under an entail as strict as he could devise, that the person who succeeds to it shall always bear the name of Disraeli. His ambition is the common, not to say vulgar, ambition of the English _parvenu_, to found a "county family." In his story of _Endymion_, published a few months before his death, the hero, starting from small beginnings, ends by becoming prime minister: this is the crown of his career, the noblest triumph an Englishman can achieve. It might have been thought that one who had been through it all, who had realised the dreams of his boyhood, who had every opportunity of learning what power and fame come to, would have liked to set forth some other conception of the end of human life, or would not have told the world so naively of his self-content at having attained the aim he had worked for. With most men the flower they have plucked withers. It might have been expected that one who was in other things an ironical cynic would at least have sought to seem disillusionised.