There are people who still believe that in all this they see sketched the very determinations, maxims, and rules which are to be found deliberately carried out in Mr. Disraeli's actual career. It is perplexing. The parallel, they assert, runs into the closest correspondence of detail. Vivian Grey's model author is Bolingbroke; and everybody knows that he, also, was Mr. Disraeli's. The young man in the book shows his reverential admiration for Bolingbroke by inventing a few passages and putting them into that personage's mouth for the better bamboozling of Lord Carabas; and it is known that Mr. Disraeli, at different periods of his life, has taken passages from other people and put them into his own mouth. But I cannot pursue this comparison or contrast, or whatever it is, farther: it will be better seen as I go on, what grounds people have had for beholding Mr. Disraeli in Vivian Grey. For the present it is enough to say, that it was Mr. Disraeli, and not Vivian Grey, who wrote this book. So much as that is quite certain. A fiction of the kind above briefly hinted at was the first fruit of Mr. Disraeli's intellect; it was in penning those pages of caricature of everybody who was notable in London society that he expended the first fresh enthusiasm of his mind, and displayed the earlier untainted innocence of his disposition. Lord Beaconsfield has spoken of it as a book written by a boy. It was that which made it so marvellous. This boy began with satire, and it might have been predicted that the juvenile would develop into an exceptional man.