Lord Beaconsfield's mind has always been occupied with home affairs, and his characteristic views on these come from the quarter whence it is supposed all truth has been derived--the East. He somehow picked them up during two years of travel in those parts, from 1829 to 1831. About the former date, Mr. Disraeli's first brilliant but very brief literary success was over. He had published a second part of "Vivian Grey," which the public somehow was too busy to read; and had issued a further work of satire, "Popanilla," which it also neglected to buy. Mr. Disraeli immediately vanished into the Orient. When, after visiting Jerusalem, and lingering, as he tells us, on the plains of Troy, he returned to these shores, he brought back with him the Asian Mystery and a whole apparatus of political and social principles. He had also some manuscripts, which did not turn out to be of so much importance--"Contarini Fleming" and "The Young Duke." It was the most surprisingly fruitful voyage of discovery that any traveller ever made. Years elapsed before all the principles were given to the world, but Mr. Disraeli had them by him. Some of them are, indeed, hinted at as early as 1835, when he issued his "Vindication of the English Constitution," before he was in Parliament. Still, the system was not divulged in its entirety until he was in the House, and had founded what became known as the "Young England School." It is to the series of political novels which he then wrote that we must turn for the complete exposition of his fundamental ideas. Somehow, it has always seemed to everybody the most natural and fitting thing in the world that Mr. Disraeli should have corrected the inaccuracies of our national history, and shown our social fallacies, by writing works of fiction. The instruction with which he began the new training of the public was this--that our history is, in all the latter part of it, entirely wrong. In "Sybil," he thus gives his general opinion of the way in which it has been written:--"All the great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented that the result is a complete mystification."