He could hardly be called a well-read man, nor were his intellectual interests numerous. His education had consisted mainly in promiscuous reading during boyhood and early youth. There are worse kinds of education for an active intelligence than to let it have the run of a large library. The wild browsings of youth, when curiosity is strong as hunger, stir the mind and give the memory some of the best food it ever gets. The weak point of such a method is that it does not teach accuracy nor the art of systematic study. In middle life natural indolence and his political occupations had kept Disraeli from filling up the gaps in his knowledge, while, in conversation, what he liked best was persiflage. He was, however, tolerably familiar with the ancient classics, and with modern English and French literature; enjoyed Quintilian and Lucian, preferred Sophocles to Æschylus and (apparently) Horace to Virgil, despised Browning, considered Tennyson the best of contemporary poets, but "not a poet of a high order."[8] Physical science seems never to have attracted him. Political economy he hated and mocked at almost as heartily as did Carlyle. People have measured his knowledge of history and geography by observing that he placed the Crucifixion in the lifetime of Augustus, and thought, down till 1878, when he had to make a speech about Afghanistan, that the Andes were the highest mountains in the world. But geography is a subject which a man of affairs does not think of reading up in later life: he is content if he can get information when he needs it. There are some bits of metaphysics and some historical allusions scattered over his novels, but these are mostly slight or superficial. He amused himself and the public by now and then propounding doctrines on agricultural matters, but would not appear to have mastered either husbandry or any other economical or commercial subject. Such things were not in his way. He had been so little in office as not to have been forced to apply himself to them, while the tide of pure intellectual curiosity had long since ebbed.
For so-called "sports" he had little taste. He liked to go mooning in a meditative way round his fields and copses, and he certainly enjoyed Nature; but there seems to be no solid evidence that the primrose was his favourite flower. In his fondness for particular words and phrases there was a touch of his artistic quality, and a touch also of the cynical view that words are the counters with which the wise play their game. There is a passage in _Contarini Fleming_ (a story into which he has put a good deal of himself) where this is set out. Contarini tells his father that he left college "because they taught me only words, and I wished to learn ideas." His father answers, "Few ideas are correct ones, and what are correct, no one can ascertain; but with words we govern men."