Their force, when they have succeeded, has been an impulse from within. They have aimed at power to impress their own personality outside them, but their operations are like the operations of the forces of nature, working from within outwards rather than towards an end of which they have been conscious. A man whose object is to gain something for himself often attains it, but when his personal life is over his work and his reputation perish along with him. In this high sense of the word Lord Beaconsfield cannot be called great, either as a man of letters or as a statesman. 'Vivian Grey' is nothing but a loud demand on his contemporaries to recognise how clever a man has appeared among them. In every one of his writings there is the same defect, except in 'Sybil' and in 'Lothair.' It is absent in 'Sybil' because he had been deeply and sincerely affected by what he had witnessed in the great towns in the North of England; it is absent in 'Lothair' because when he wrote that book his personal ambition had for the time been satisfied, and he could look round him with the _siccum lumen_ of his intellect. He had then reached the highest point of his political aspiration, and money he did not care for unless required for pressing necessities. It is clear from 'Sybil' that there had been a time when he could have taken up as a statesman, with all his heart, the cause of labour. He had suffered himself in the suffering and demoralisation which he had witnessed, and if the 'young generation' to whom he appealed would have gone along with him he might have led a nobler crusade than Cœur de Lion. But it was not in him to tread a thorny road with insufficient companionship. He had wished, but had not wished sufficiently, to undertake a doubtful enterprise. He was contented to leave things as he found them, instead of reconstructing society to make himself Prime Minister. [Sidenote: PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS]