POLITICAL NOVELS.

Patea Mail, 4 December 1880, Page 2

POLITICAL NOVELS.

Another romance from Lord Beaconsfield’s pen : another life-like sketch of familiar great men, with a central hero as fresh and interesting as Lothair* Everybody knows in advance that the new novel will be the book of the season. ‘‘ Endymion” is the title of this new romance, written by “ Disraeli the Younger” at the age of 7C. Messrs Longmans, the great publishers of Patornostcr-row, whose warehouse is an immense concern, have given £12,000 for the right to publish the book. They will issue it simultaneously in England and America, and probably get half their money back from some New York publisher for the privilege of being first in the field; though the Yankee pirates will run a race to bring out cheap editions within a ■week of the first legitimate copy. It is their winning way. No competing bookseller can do so in Great Britain without infringing copyright. The English and American newspapers have been bidding high for the privilege of an “ early copy.” One journal is reported to have offered a thousand pounds for the right to have a copy twelve hours before its neighbors. There was the same eager rush for “ Lothair,” but the publishers refused, with sound judgment, to sell or give a monopoly to one newspaper for even half a day. “ Endymion ” is the last (shall we say the last ?) of the “ Vivian Grey” series of politico-social romances of the period preceding the great Reform agitation of ’32. This story is said to bring into view Wellington, Palmerston (not yet the great Lord Pam, with twig in his mouth a la Punch), George Hudson the Railway King who died almost a beggar, Cobden of the Corn-law League, Napoleon 111. while he was kicking his heels as an exile in London before the second Revolution, and Cardinal Manning in his Oxford days. The ex-Premier is irrepressible. No sooner does he get a few months’ relaxation from “ high politics” than he startles and amuses the world—yes, the whole reading world—by publishing the reflections of his idle hours in the form of a subtle romance. The hidden satire, the thin-veiled portraiture of conspicuous men of a stirring era that is past but not forgotten; and the philosophical outcome of his own strange eventful history, will probably be found in the pages of “ Endymion,” when copies reach this colony,