'This week has been the most delightful of all our travels. We dined every day on the roof of a house by moonlight; visited the Holy Sepulchre of course, though avoided the other _coglionerie_. The House of Loretto is probability to them. But the Easterns will believe anything. Tombs of the Kings very fine. Weather delicious; mild summer heat. Made an immense sensation. Received visits from the Vicar-General of the Pope, two Spanish priors, &c.... Mr. Briggs, the great Egyptian merchant, has written from England to say that great attention is to be paid me, because I am the son of the celebrated author.' The extracts must be cut short. The visit to Jerusalem was in February 1831. In April Disraeli was in Egypt, and ascended the Nile to Thebes. 'Conceive a feverish and tumultuous dream full of triumphial gates, processions of paintings, interminable walls of heroic sculpture, granite colossi of gods and kings, prodigious obelisks, avenues of sphinxes, and halls of a thousand columns thirty feet in girth and of proportionate height. My eyes and mind yet ache with a grandeur so little in unison with our own littleness. The landscape was quite characteristic; mountains of burning sand. Vegetation unnaturally vivid, groves of cocoa trees, groups of crocodiles, and an ebony population in a state of nudity armed with spears of reeds.' Far in the future lay the Suez Canal and the influence which the young visitor was one day to exercise over the fortunes of Egypt. The tour was over. His health was recovered. He was to return to England and take to work again, uncertain as yet whether he was not to go back to his Coke and Blackstone. His thoughts for the present were turned on Bradenham and its inmates. A chest of Eastern armour, pipes, and other curiosities was ready-packed at the end of May, to accompany him home for the decoration of the hall. On May 28 he wrote in high spirits of his approaching return: 'I am delighted with my father's progress. How I long to be with him, dearest of men, flashing our quills together, standing together in our chivalry as we will do, now that I have got the use of my brain for the first time in my life.' These letters from abroad, and the pictures which Disraeli draws of himself and of his adventures in them, show him as he really was, making no effort to produce an effect, in the easy undress of family confidence, not without innocent vanities, but light-hearted and gay at one moment, at another deeply impressionable with anything which was interesting or beautiful. The affectations which so strongly characterised his public appearances were but a dress deliberately assumed, to be thrown off when he left the stage like a theatrical wardrobe.