. CANNING AND DISRAELI IN POLITICAL NOVELS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " 5PECTATOR:1
SIH,—I am obliged by your insertion of my amateurish letter re .Disraeli. That "Beduin Sands" was intended for Monckton Milnes never occurred to me, and, though you are probably right in your identification, still something may be said in favour of mine, as more corresponding with chronology, inexact . in either case, though violently so in that of Lord Houghton. Lord Steyne's charade was acted some time in the "twenties," during the reign of George IV., and Bedwia Sands is described as an Eastern dandy, recently returned from his travels. This return, in Disraeli's case, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, took place in 1831. Now Mines, according to the same authority, did not, visit Egypt and the Levant till 1842-43, though he had previously travelled in Greece. To identify him with Beth-in Sands, therefore, requires a. good stretch of novelistic licence, though it must be admitted that Thackeray used this pretty freely. For instance, at the end of Vanity Fair he kills off Lord Hertford in 1830, his death being attri- buted (in the papers) to "the shock caused by the downfall of the ancient French monarchy," while in Pendennis he coolly brings him to life again, nearly ten years later, when railways were in their infancy. (In point of fact, he died in 1842.)-
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