D'Israeli, ISAAC

D'Israeli, ISAAC, man of letters, was born at Enfield in 1766, the only son of Benjamin D'Israeli (1730-1816), a Jewish merchant, who in 1801 was made an English citizen. Isaac was educated at a school near Enfield, and for two years at Amsterdam under a freethinking tutor; in 1782 he returned home, bent on authorship. He published two volumes of verse and seven romances; but his Curiosities of Literature (6 vols. 1791-1834), the fruit of much reading at the British Museum, showed his forte to lie not in creative literature, but in the illustration of history and literary character. To this he devoted himself with much success, his chief other books being Calamities of Authors (1812-13); Quarrels of Authors (1814); Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I. (5 vols. 1828-30), which won him the honour of D.C.L. from Oxford; and Amenities of Literature (1840). Though somewhat slipshod and inaccurate, they are pleasant, readable works, and gained for their author the friendship and admiration of Byron, Scott, Southey, Moore, Bulwer Lytton, and Rogers, the last of whom observed, with his usual sneer: 'There's a man with only half an intellect who writes books that must live.' In 1802 Isaac D'Israeli married Maria Basevi (1775-1847), and by her he had one daughter and four sons, the eldest the famous statesman, Lord Beaconsfield (q.v.). Always a lax observer of the Jewish faith, he broke with the synagogue in 1817, and had all his children baptised. In 1829 he removed from Bloomsbury Square to Bradenham House, Bucks, where, after nine years of blindness, he died 19th January 1848. See, prefixed to the 1849 edition of the Curiosities, a memoir by Lord Beaconsfield, who also published a collected edition of his works (7 vols. 1858-59).