6 fine morning, so early that we may imagine his priestly warders were at lauds or ' matins,' Lothair, acting on the principle that it is only the early bird that gets the worm, gave them the slip, and was off to Malta in an open boat! How did he induce the boatmen to take him? That is easily answered. He generally carried about him as much as Fortunatus.' He pulled out a purse much better lined than we should have thought it likely to be after he had lain senseless for hours in an ambulance among the Pope's Zouaves, and had spent so much of his time afterwards with the priests. Nor is the allusion to Fortunatus particularly happy, for that hero of fairy tales only had in his possession one gold piece at a time, and though he could have one every time he wished for it, it was impossible for him to have several at once. He was the anticipation and impersonation in mythical times of cheques for one pound to bearer at sight, and of Scotch one pound notes, both of them very mean representatives of boundless wealth. But Mr. Disraeli is not bound to know all about Fortunatus and his wishingcap, so we take his words, as we suppose he means them to be understood, that Lothair, a man of enormous wealth, always carried a great sum about with him in gold. But here agian we are forced to differ from him, because, so far as our own experience of 'swells' goes, they are the last men in the world to whom we should go expecting to find say a hundred sovereigns in their pockets. But see, young men of fashion! the use of specie. All the cheque-books in the world would have availed Lothair nothing in Sicily, but he had his pockets filled with ducats, and so was able to pay his passage to Malta. Do not therefore dare to say that it is a bore to carry so much gold about one, that it burns holes in your pockets, or any nonsense of the kind. Take warning by Lothair, and always have as much gold with you as you can inconveniently carry. But here we have the bird flown away to Malta, and the priests 'praying' as Captain Spark of the Enchantress' used to pray' at his absence. At Malta Lothair found Mr. Phoebus, whose ideas on the specie question were as sound as his own. Nay! they were sounder, for whereas Lothair sometimes drew a cheque, and did not altogether despise paper money in its right place, Mr. Phoebus, like the philosopher, carried all his goods about with him, except that the sage had nothing, while the cabin of the 'Pan'-the yacht of Mr. Phoebus-had chests full of velvet bags crammed with pearls, rubies, Venetian sequins, Napoleons, and golden piastres.' That vulgar, but not useless coin, the British sovereign, was wanting, and when we remember that Lothair's gold was all in ducats, we have an uneasy feeling that a bad time may be coming, when our standard gold coin may be despised by lords and artists as of inferior and impure alloy. At this point we must say that the perusal of Lothair' has made us most discontented with our lot in life. Here we have been moderately successful, making our way by the toil of the brain, using our head as much, and our hands as little, as we can; the reason being, of course, that we like small hands and broad foreheads. But 'Lothair' is a bad book. It puts evil thoughts into our head. How many times have we dined with our fatherin-law, who was in respect equal, and even superior, to old Cantacuzene, and yet when did he ever treat us as that commercial offshoot of emperors treated his son-in-law? Sometimes, indeed, after dinner, he has vaguely hinted at his desire to do something for us after he died, but we have always looked on that as a doubtful good; doubtful both by reason of its distance and because the worst time of all for a man to do anything is when he is dead. But here this old Cantacuzene was in the habit of putting cheques for £5000 at a time in his daughter's napkin at breakfast on her birthday. What he would have done after dinner no man can say; but every son-in-law who reads this book, and knows that he is just as good as Mr. Phoebus, or better, and that his fatherin-law is nearly as well off as old Cantacuzene, will expect to be as handsomely treated, elsc there will be murder of many fathers-in-law, and in every case the counsel for the prisoner will only read to the jury this portion of Lothair,' and they will, without retiring from their box, return a verdict of justifiable socricide. But to proceed. The family of Phoebus were peculiar, especially the ladies; the only part of their faces that the sun would burn was their long eyelashes. For the sake of these they wore tilted hats.' At first, as there is so much rank and fashion in the book, we thought this was a misprint for 'titled,' but no, it is 'tilted;' ye ladies tell us what is a tilted hat. Then their hair was 'never ending.' We have known a father who had a baby which remained bald from its birth till it grew to be a boy of ten years old, and then was only hairified' by being sent to Macassar; we have known this unfortunate father in the agony of his heart exclaim against the hair of his infant as never beginning,' but what is never ending hair?' If it had no ends how could it be cut? Yet these ladies had it. Then their bodies were so safe that, though they wore dirks, it was only to defend their girdles.' | Diana and all her nymphs, why sevenWith all his wealth and extravagance, Mr. leagued boots in an island of the Agean? In Phoebus was a modest man. When he was the Steppes of Tartary, in the Great Desert leaving Malta in a triumphal procession, he of Gobi, across the Sahara, or if any one took his stand, not on the quarter-deck, but wished to reach the Sources of the Nile or on the galley' of his yacht, thereby intend- the Mountains of the Moon, they might be ing, no doubt, to show this world so dead to of some use. But in an island of the Egean sensual pleasure, and so deep in thought, they must have been a nuisance. Two or that true wisdom consists in cookery, and three steps would have brought the artistic that the only master of arts is a chef de tyrant into the sea on either coast of his docuisine. We are also inclined to think that minions. Then alas! he would have been this wondrous family lived in the forecastle, drowned, unless a great fish had swallowed for we remark that when they were nearing him, and he would have been lost at once to Joppa, Mr. Phoebus called out, Man a-head Art and the Aryan race. there, tell Madame Phoebus to come on deck for the first sight of Mount Lebanon.' Did they always live 'forward' among the crew; or had they only for this once migrated thither that Lothair, the great Marquis of Carabas, might have the state-room of the 'Pan' all to himself, and his broodings on the divine Theodora ? 'Nearing Joppa'? You may well ask why they were nearing Joppa, when we last heard of them at Malta. From Malta, Mr. Phoebus took Lothair to an island in the Egean, of which he was the 'tyrant' in the old Greek, or as he would call it, Aryan sense. How he got it no one knew, but as an island of the Egean, it was almost as peculiar as Mr. Phoebus's family. It was of no inconsiderable dimensions,' whereas the islands of the Egean are usually small; it was well wooded, though these islands are generally arid and bare. Here Mr. Phoebus 'lived a life partly Oriental, partly Venetian, and partly idiosyncratic.' Most remarkable was he when he hunted. The ladies were mounted on 'Anatolian chargers with golden bells,' but that was nothing to the tyrant Phoebus Apollo himself. His attire for the chase beat even a French Count hollow, and we must look to the last Christmas pantomime to equal it. He wore 'green velvet,' and 'seven-leagued boots,' and added to the majesty of his mien by sounding a wondrous twisted horn, rife with all the inspiring or directing notes of musical and learned venerie.' Truth compels us to add that this garb of the tyrant of the Egean was not original. It was copied from a dreaded enemy of our youth, and the familiar friend of our later theatrical life. When we last saw the Giant Blunderbore, and, in fact, whenever we have seen him, he was dressed just like Mr. Phœbus, even down to his 'sevenleagued boots.' He was engaged, too, in venery,' though of another kind than that pursued by Mr. Phoebus. Mr. Disraeli should remember that some words in the English language are ambiguous, and that one of these is 'venery.' But why in the name of 6 But we must not dwell on that island; it is too seducing. Like Ulysses, we stuff our ears with the wise man's wax' and hasten on. A Russian commission, and the promise of a patent of nobility, and a decoration of a high class,' lured Mr. Phœbus away from his island and the worship of Pan, of whom he firmly believed that the great God would one day return to earth. It is remarkable that he left his boots behind him just when he might have needed them. Perhaps they were heir-looms, or a Palladium which even he could not separate from the island. Perhaps they were only borrowed for that hunt, and he had to return them to our old friend the Giant. Be that as it may, we never hear of them again. That Russian commission was to make sketches in the Holy Land. That was why Lothair and his friends were nearing Joppa; and when they reached Jerusalem, Lothair, who was now in perfect health and spirits, except that he still brooded over Theodora, was rejoiced to find his friends Bertram and St. Aldegonde, who had paired till Easter to go and shoot pelicans and crocodiles in Nubia, and getting disgusted with the sport, had turned towards Palestine to 'do' Jerusalem. There two things happened. Bertram Dash fell desperately in love with Euphrosyne Cantacuzene, one of the ladies with the tilted hats. Though her dirk might defend her girdle it was powerless to protect her heart, for she returned the affection of the noble Dash. The other thing was that Lothair made the acquaintance of one Mr. Paraclete, a very strange character, more like a spirit than a man, who lived among the oaks of Bashan, and was much milder in temper, and certainly not so corpulent, as its bulls. This Syrian personage, whose very name indicates the nature of the office which he was destined to fulfil towards Lothair, convinced our hero, among other things, of the personality of the Creator, exposed the Pantheism of Mr. Phoebus, which he declared to be merely Atheism in domino,' and having reconciled him to the Christian religion, left him in comparative peace. This happy frame of mind was further strengthened by a visit which our hero paid to this remarkable and mysterious Syrian, whose family, with a good fortune rare in all lands, and rarest of all in the East, still held the same lands in Bashan which they owned at the birth of Our Saviour. There, with the high privilege of a Gospel of their own, these happy Paracletes had lived ever since; and we can only say if one of them is in existence when we next go to Palestine, we shall not be long in finding our way to Bashan. With a mind much at ease Lothair was free to act, and so when his old Red Republican commander, to whom we ought to have said long ago he had been indebted for his life, when early in the book he was fool enough to try and convince a Fenian meeting of their madness-when this commander, we say, and man of action suddenly came on him in Palestine as a Turkish general, and advised him to go home and lead a life of action, Lothair was quite ready to follow his advice. Bertram's love affair, more urgent even than an insolent letter from Glyn' on his political misbehaviour, forced St. Aldegonde to go home that he might further the happiness of the young lovers. So home Lothair and the two went, leaving Phoebus and the ladies to follow. By the cleverness of Mr. Putney Giles, a satisfactory contradiction of the paragraphs which the Roman Catholic conspirators had spread about Lothair's conversion appeared in the papers. Lothair, with the vanity and sensitiveness of youth, fancies that all eyes must have been watching for him and wondering at his absence. One stroll down St. James's street, one visit to White's, and one meeting with a noble and grey-headed patron of the Arts in Great Britain,' whose portrait it is impossible to mistake though he is no longer with us, quite convince Lothair that he had never been even missed. It had been a great consolation to him in Palestine to find from some letters which Bertram showed him, that the Lady Corisande still took an interest in him. But when he returned to England rather prepared to renew his advances, he was piqued to find that she was as good as engaged, so every one said, to the Duke of Brecon. Then he sought the St. Jeromes, and we must say did flirt, or try to flirt, with Miss Arundel; but by this time the lady with the violet eyes had given him up. She had not forgiven him, we suppose, for leaving Catesby and Coleman in the lurch. She was resolved to take the veil, and she took it. The Cardinal again lectures Lothair, and tells him as a very great secret that the Pope is about to call a general council. Lothair Then seems neither to have thought this secret worth knowing, nor anything else, compared with Miss Arundel's determination. I have not a friend left in the world,' he exclaimed. In vain Lady St. Jerome told him that she and her husband recognized 'the Divine purpose' in Miss Arundel's decision, and bowed to it.' 'I do not bow to it,' said Lothair; 'I think it barbarous and unwise.' When he heard that the Cardinal entirely approved of the step, he ungratefully said, 'Then my confidence in him is utterly destroyed.' When Theodora was dead, and Clare Arundel had taken the veil, what was left for Lothair but to return to his old love, Lady Corisande. Truc, he might have cut his throat; but then instead of being a farce, this novel would have been a tragedy. No, he did not cut his throat. He went down to Muriel Towers by way of beginning to act, and from Muriel he went back to Brentham, only to find Bertram's affair happily settled; for that magnificent old Cantacuzene had been down to see the Duke of Dash, and quite convinced both him and the Duchess that the degradation if anything lay in a Cantacuzene marrying a Dash. As soon as the Duke saw that his future daughter-in-law was of 'imperial lineage,' he gave in, and shook hands with old Cantacuzene, who put the coping-stone to the edifice of his liberality, by offering to make any settlement on Miss Euphrosyne that the Duke desired. That pair made happy, Lothair only remains; like the last taper at a ball, he had seen all his friends out-all either dead, or nuns, or married; what remained for him but to offer his hand to the Lady Corisande, who, for his sake, it now turned out, had refused both Lord Carisbrooke and the Duke of Brecon. In the Lady Corisande's own garden he told her the following most atrocious story: He had committed many follies, he said, but 'to one opinion I have been constant, in one I am unchanged, and that is my adoring love for you.' No wonder she turned pale at this awful falsehood; but for all that, gently taking his arm, she hid her face on her breast, and he sealed with an embrace her speechless form.' Then they sat down, and then he told her another story, that of his affection for Theodora; and we only hope he was able to reconcile the two. nothing might be wanting, he pulled out the string of pearls which his old love had sealed up more than a year ago, and which we suspect he had ever since carried about with him, like Mr. Phoebus. Then they opened the case without breaking the seal with Roma stamped on it. There were the pearls, and there was a slip of paper on That which Theodora had written some unseen | But it was necessary, some one will say, that words.' It is not very clear by whom they were unseen,' perhaps by Theodora herself, who must have added clairvoyance and the habit of writing with her eyes shut to her many accomplishments. At any rate they were seen now, and it ran thus: The offering of Theodora to Lothair's Bride.' Some hours had now elapsed, luncheon was over, and they were missed. Bells have been ringing for you in every direction,' said the Duchess, as they returned. Where can you have been?' I have been in Corisande's garden,' said Lothair, and she has given me a rose.' So ends Lothair,' of which we have been thus careful in giving a faithful analysis, lest any one should say that we have not read the book. We have indicated our opinion pretty freely as we went along. That we have found it lively and amusing we are quite ready to admit. But when the Olympians descend into the arena and contend with common mortals, we expect to find them something more than lively and amusing. If they reveal themselves to vulgar eyes, it is at the peril of their Godheads that they come into the lists. If nobility 'obliges, still more do statesmanship and former literary fame. Mr. Disraeli, the author of 'Vivian Grey,' and 'Henrietta Temple,' of Coningsby,' and 'Sybil,' and 'Tanered,' was bound if he wrote again to be something more than lively and amusing. He had already thrown his quoit beyond the mark of most men; in Lothair' it was necessary to equal or surpass his former cast or fail. Judged by what he has already done both in literature and statesmanship, 'Lothair' is a failure. It may be very instructive to our golden youth to be warned against the machinations of Rome; but to effect this purpose, it was hardly worth the while of the leader of a great political party in the State to write a book which has been as sour grapes to the teeth of all the Roman Catholics in the land. A great statesman is bound, in our opinion, to consider all sides and respect all creeds. If he exposes the errors of any Church, he ought not to confound the innocent with the guilty. We believe that there are no purer highminded gentlemen on earth than some of our Roman Catholic countrymen, and it is a great mistake in a statesman like Mr. Disraeli to deride them in a book which he calls a novel, but which is after all a political pamphlet, and a bid for the bigoted voices of Exeter Hall. Such an outrage will neither add to his followers in St. Stephens, nor to his reputation as a writer, because it sins alike against good taste and justice. our youth should be warned; salus populi suprema lex, and this was why Mr. Disraeli put that line from Terence on the title-page: Nôsse omnia hæc salus est adolescentulis. Well! there are worse things in Lothair' even than the Church of Rome. What is to be said of a young nobleman, who, after proposing offhand to one young lady, flirts desperately with a second, and then falls madly in love with another man's wife! That adultery is a deadly sin is no doubt one of the things most salutary for young men to know; though as the Bible already existed, not to mention the Book of Common Prayer, and the Whole Duty of Man,' we do not think it necessary to have written a book to prove it. But it is what often happens. Very true. So long as men are men, and women women, such social crimes will never fail among us. But why dwell on them or point them out? It was to show the perfection of Theodora and the weakness of Lothair. Theodora was indeed divine,' and Lothair we have seen described as a goose,' but then he was a golden one; we quite agree with Theodora's friends in their estimate of her character, and when we find any woman like her, we may perhaps show ourselves as great geese as Lothair. One great fault of the book to our minds is this; that as Theodora is the heroine, and Lothair's character is too weak and silly to supply her loss, the interest in the story ceases with the second volume when Theodora dies. The Lady Corisande still lives, indeed, but she is little better than a lay figure, very well dressed-an aristocratic doll which has been taught to speak and walk. The third volume is filled with the scenes at the Agostini Palace and in the Coliscum, which are as incomprehensible to us as the transcendental philosophy, or the Comtist vagaries. In the third volume, too, are chiefly to be found those revelations of the life and doings of the Phœbus family, which are among the most absurd and unnatural parts of the book. And now we have uttered the word 'unnatural,' that is the great sin of 'Lothair.' It is natural, neither in the story, though that is sufficiently interesting to be amusing and readable, nor in the society described, nor in the personages which figure in that society. Most unnatural is it in the style and in the language. That there are happy thoughts and epigrammatic sentences sown broadcast in its pages need scarcely be said of a novel written by Mr. Disraeli. But as the true pearl lies embedded in the loose fibre of a mollusc, so Mr. Disraeli's gems of speech and thought are hidden in a vast maze of verbiage which can seldom be called English, and in a novel in which there is so much lovevery frequently is downright nonsense. The making. This is a merit we are told, but a first editions were full of misprints, such as merit to our minds rather suited to the 'Stephanopolis,' for 'Stephanotis,' remind- meridian of country reading-clubs and ladies' ing us of poor Sir Archibald Alison's 'Sir schools. It is one which makes Lothair' Peregrine Pickle' for Sir Peregrine Mait- very safe reading for young ladies, but at the land, though not quite equalling his transla- same time is fatal to it as a living and lasttion of droit du timbre into 'timber duties.' ing work. So far as feeling is concerned, Some of these have disappeared in after im- Lothair' is as dull as ditch-water and as pressions, but all through the book whole flat as a flounder. But to return to our sentences would have to be rewritten to great complaint. We say the language is make them either grammatical or intel- unnatural as well as the story and the ligible. characters. If one touch of Nature makes the whole world kin,' surely the utter absence of it in 'Lothair' must set the world against it as a work of art. It is certainly not natural in young men to make reverences of ceremony' even to Duchesses. Still less is it natural to speak of a young lady having a tumult on her brow,' or of ladies out riding as 'jumping on their barbs and jenets," or as riding, even in an island of the Ægean, 'on cream-coloured Anatolian chargers with golden bells.' When a lord like Lothair goes to the opera, if he is goose enough to give the box-keeper a guinea, it is not natural to describe him as giving that official an overpowering honorarium.' 'A modish scene,' is certainly not native English, any more than brusk.' How a woman or a woman's portrait can make a fury,' unless she were married to a certain dark gentleman who shall be nameless, we cannot tell. One of our minor poets named Milton, who was at least as famous as Mr. Disraeli for his wealth of words, has indeed sung thus: As for the characters, many of them are said to be too closely drawn from real life. Here we think the gossips who uttered this sentiment are unjust. No doubt suggestions of character were presented to Mr. Disraeli by those whom he met in daily intercourse, but it is the privilege of an author to develop these mere suggestions into the finished characters in his work. We do not believe that Mr. Disraeli has done more than this, even in that memorable case of the Oxford Professor, in which Mr. Goldwin Smith is so determined that the cap shall fit his own head. For that cap there are many candidates in Young Oxford. Who shall point out the man among us who entirely matches Mr. Pinto the Portuguese, whose observation of English was that it was limited to four or five words, nice, jolly, charming, love, and fond.' Why he did not add awful' and awfully to his list we cannot imagine; but we cannot help wishing for our own sakes that Mr. Disraeli's command of the vernacular had been almost as limited. There are points of Pinto which can be traced in several men; but the whole Pinto is a cento made out of several persons. In one point many agree with him. He was not an intellectual Croesus, but his pockets were full of sixpences.' Small talk and small change are to be found in this metropolis in many mouths and pockets. The same may be said of Hugo Bohun, who certainly says some of the smartest things in the book, of the surly and dissolute Duke of Brecon, of the outspoken St. Aldegonde, and the great Duke of Dash himself? They are all very near being the portraits of people we know; but just as we are saying, how like so and so,' a difference appears, and we add, yet after all it cannot be he.' But as a great author on his death-bed said to his children, above all things be natural'-so we repeat that the great fault of 'Lothair' is that it is not true to nature. There is an unreality about even the best characters in the book which mars their life, and makes them little better than abstractions and dreams. Very remarkable is the entire absence of passion 6 'Where perhaps some beauty lies, The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.' That was a bold, as it is still a beautiful metaphor, yet we can fancy some carping critic of the Caroline age ridiculing the young poet as likening his mistress to a puppy-dog's tail. What would he now say if he heard that, in what is meant for sober prose, a lovely lady of the nineteenth century was called 'the Cynosure of the Empyrean,' the puppy-dog's tail of the burning fiery vault of heaven.' What could he say but that Mr. Disraeli had out-Miltoned Milton, and made himself and his heroine supremely ridiculous. But it is just this fatal wealth, whether of words or worldly goods, which is the ruin of Lothair. The language is an affected unnatural euphuism, a jargon of no particular time or class, abounding in unmeaning adjectives and senseless substantives, piled in profusion one upon the other, setting at defiance both the rules of grammar and common-sense. Penny-a-lining run mad is perhaps the best description that we can give of it. It is just what the late la |