Contarini is but Disraeli himself in the sick period of undetermined energies. He meditates on the great problems of life, and arrives at the conclusions adopted almost universally by intellectual men before they have learnt to strike out their course and to control circumstances and their own nature. 'I believe in that destiny before which the ancients bowed. Modern philosophy has infused into the breast of man a spirit of scepticism, but I think that ere long science will become again imaginative, and that as we become more profound we may also become more credulous. Destiny is our will, and our will is nature. The son who inherits the organisation of the father will be doomed to the same fortunes as his sire, and again the mysterious matter in which his ancestors were moulded may in other forms, by a necessary attraction, act upon his fate. All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the mystery.' Such passages as this were not ominous of much success in the high functions to which Contarini was aspiring. Much more interesting, because more natural, is a dialogue which was probably an exact reproduction of a conversation between Disraeli and his father. The father of Contarini entirely objects to his son's proposed destination of himself. 'A poet!' exclaims the old man. 'What were the great poets in their lifetime? The most miserable of their species--depressed, doubtful, obscure, or involved in petty quarrels and petty persecutions; often unappreciated, utterly uninfluential, beggars, flatterers of men, unworthy even of their recognition. What a train of disgustful incidents! what a record of degrading circumstances is the life of a great poet! A man of great energies aspires that they should be felt in his lifetime; that his existence should be rendered more intensely vital by the constant consciousness of his multiplied and multiplying powers. Is posthumous fame a substitute for all this? Try the greatest by this test, and what is the result? Would you rather have been Homer or Julius Cæsar, Shakespeare or Napoleon? No one doubts. We are active beings, and our sympathy, above all other sympathies, is with great actions. Remember that all this time I am taking for granted you may be a Homer. Let us now recollect that it is perhaps the most impossible incident that can occur. The high poetic talent, as if to prove that the poet is only at the best a wild, although beautiful, error of nature, is the rarest in creation. What you have felt is what I have felt myself. Mix in society and I will answer for it that you lose your poetic feeling; for in you, as in the great majority, it is not a matter of faculty originating in a peculiar organisation, but simply the consequence of nervous susceptibility that is common to us all.'