Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/311

 of "Coningsby." Benjamin inherited from his father the volatile, speculative mind, with an additional tincture of Voltairean wit. His free intelligence sported throughout his life with a flame-like swiftness and levity over and under the surface of all things, human and divine. It is a charm of Disraeli and the secret of his pervasive and savory irony that his intellect never conformed, never lost its quick untrammeled lambency—that it remained to the end the most mobile of all earthy types of mind, the absolutely aweless intellect of the emancipated Jew.

In the composition of the son there was a fiery element, not present in the father, namely, a romantic imagination, which had been stirred by the French Revolution, colored by the romances of Scott, and kindled to a flame by the poetry of Shelley, and by the poetry, the picturesque travels, and the social celebrity of Lord Byron. As a boy in his teens, Benjamin attended with his father the publisher Murray's literary dinners; and among his earliest jottings is a record of a conversation between him and Tom Moore with regard to Byron who was then, 1822, in exile. The effect of these various stimuli upon his lively sensibility was to make him for the time being a literary and political radical, for a long time to come a Byronist in his moods and manners, and perhaps for the rest of his life something of a Byronist in his inexhaustible appetite for celebrity, for being conspicuous, for making an impression. He was to declare later that "a great