As a tale, 'Coningsby' is nothing; but it is put together with extreme skill to give opportunities for typical sketches of character, and for the expression of opinions on social and political subjects. We have pictures of fashionable society, gay and giddy, such as no writer ever described better; peers, young, middle-aged, and old, good, bad, and indifferent, the central figure a profligate old noble of immense fortune, whose person was easily recognised, and whose portrait was also preserved by Thackeray. Besides these, intriguing or fascinating ladies, political hacks, country gentlemen, mill-owners, and occasional wise outsiders, looking on upon the chaos and delivering oracular interpretations or prophecies. Into the middle of such a world the hero is launched, being the grandson and possible heir of the wicked peer. Lord Monmouth is a specimen of the order which was making aristocratic government impossible. To tax corn to support Lord Monmouth was plainly impossible. The story opens at Eton, which Disraeli describes with an insight astonishing in a writer who had no experience of English public school life, and with a fondness which confesses how much he had lost in the substitutes to which he had been himself condemned. There Coningsby makes acquaintance with the high-born youths who are to be his companions in the great world which is to follow, then in the enjoyment of a delightful present, and brimming with enthusiastic ambitions. They accompany each other to their fathers' castles, and schemes are meditated and begun for their future careers; Disraeli letting fall, as he goes on, his own political opinions, and betraying his evident disbelief in existing Conservatism, and in its then all-powerful leader. He finds Peel constructing a party without principles, with a basis therefore necessarily latitudinarian, and driving into political infidelity. There were shouts about Conservatism; but the question, What was to be conserved? was left unanswered. The Crown was to keep its prerogatives provided they were not exercised; the House of Lords might keep its independence if it was never asserted; the ecclesiastical estate if it was regulated by a commission of laymen. Everything, in short, that was established might remain as long as it was a phrase and not a fact. The Conservatism of Sir Robert 'offered no redress for the present, and made no preparations for the future. On the arrival of one of those critical conjunctures which would periodically occur in all States, the power of resistance would be wanting; the barren curse of political infidelity would paralyse all action, and the Conservative Constitution would be discovered to be a _caput mortuum_.