Isaac Disraeli, who died in 1848, at the age of eighty-two, was “a complete literary character, a man who really passed his life in his library. Even marriage produced no change in these habits: he rose to enter the chamber where he lived alone with his books, and at night his lamp was ever lit within the same walls.” His father destined him for business; but this he opposed so strongly as to compose a long poem against commerce, which he attempted to get published. In spite of all his father could say or do, young Disraeli determined to become a literary man. His first efforts were in poetry and romance; but he soon found out that his true destiny was literary history; and in 1790 he published anonymously _Curiosities of Literature_, the success of which led him to devote the remainder of his long life to literary and historical researches, which he prosecuted partly in the British Museum, where he was a constant visitor when the _readers_ were not more than half a dozen daily: he also worked in his own library, which was very extensive. His _Curiosities_ reached eleven editions; and in acknowledgment of his _Life and Reign of Charles I._ he was made D.C., &c. by the University of Oxford. He is thus personally described by his gifted son: He was fair, with a Bourbon nose, and brown eyes of extraordinary beauty and lustre. He wore a small black-velvet cap, but his white hair latterly touched his shoulders in curls almost as flowing as in his boyhood. His extremities were delicate and well formed, and his leg, at his last hour, as shapely as in his youth, which showed the vigour of his frame. Latterly he had become corpulent. He did not excel in conversation, though in his domestic circle he was garrulous. Every thing interested him; and blind, and eighty-two, he was still as susceptible as a child. One of his last acts was to compose some verses of gay gratitude to his daughter-in-law, who was his London correspondent, and to whose lively pen his last years were indebted for constant amusement. He had by nature a singular volatility, which never deserted him. His feelings, though always amiable, were not painfully deep, and amid joy or sorrow the philosophic vein was ever evident. He more resembled Goldsmith than any man that I can compare him to: in his conversation his apparent confusion of ideas ending with some felicitous phrase of genius, his _naïveté_, his simplicity not untouched with a dash of sarcasm affecting innocence—one was often reminded of the gifted and interesting friend of Burke and Johnson. There was, however, one trait in which my father did not resemble Goldsmith: he had no vanity. Indeed, one of his few infirmities was rather a deficiency of self-esteem.