man is one who affects the mind of his generation." His own experience proved to him that an imaginative writer who molds the purposes of young men entering their majority governs them as truly as the statesman who taxes their incomes.
Byron died in 1824. Disraeli "carried on" in 1826 by publishing at twenty-one his first novel, "Vivian Grey," in which the hero, meditating a career in Parliament, thinks "Don Juan" may serve as a model for his style in the Commons, Milton in the House of Lords. He introduced Byron as Apollo in his delectable skit "Ixion in Heaven" and as Lord Cadurcis in "Venetia." Travelling through the East in imitation of his predecessor, he conceived his "Revolutionary Epick," with its apotheosis of Napoleon, at a Byronic moment, "standing," as he tells us, with full sense of the romantic magnificence of his posture, "upon Asia, and gazing upon Europe with the broad Hellespont alone between us, and the shadow of night descending on the mountains." He carried on by returning to England smoking a chibouk in token of his oriental sojourn. He wrote oriental tales. He thought himself a great poet afflicted with a hopeless woe. He indulged in gloomy vapors and in outbursts of cynicism. He solaced himself with the society of fair women, with whom he quarreled melodramatically and whom he flattered extravagantly and successfully. He anticipated the sallies of Whistler and Wilde by remarking to a host who had praised his own wine at a dinner party and boasted that he had
