- lected all the graces and charities of artifice, they have adopted
all its falsehood and deceit."
Mr. Howard de Howard, rebuking a drawing room
smart set, speaks for himself and his class:[1]
"Gentlemen, I have sate by in silence and heard my king
derided, and my God blasphemed; but now when you attack
the aristocracy, I can no longer refrain from noticing so obviously
intentional an insult. You have become personal."
When young Chillingly absconds for a taste of real life,
he leaves a letter for his father in which he promises a safe
return, and adds,—[2]
"I will then take my place in polite society, call upon you
to pay all expenses, and fib on my own account to any extent
required by that world of fiction which is peopled by illusions
and governed by shams."
In his first adventure, masquerading as a yeoman, he is
quizzed by Uncle Bovill on topics for the intelligent,—politics,
agriculture, finance. To maintain his incognito,
he affects ignorance; and is astonished at the triumphant
deduction,—[3]
"Just as I thought, sir; you know nothing of these matters—you
are a gentleman born and bred—your clothes can't disguise
you, sir."
Disraeli, whose career paralleled Lytton's in several
ways, takes the same tone toward his own social environment,
but his deeper political earnestness led him to criticise
that environment in the wider as well as narrower
social sense. In his first real novel we find the latter
by itself, in such touches as this:[4]
