be
ashamed of, but had he done nothing else he would have been unknown. But
literature, first seriously cultivated as a means of livelihood,
outlasted his political ambitions, and his books are to-day his only
claim to remembrance. They made a strong impression at the time they
were written, and many are still read as much as ever, by a generation
born after his death. Their popularity is not of the catchpenny sort;
thoughtful people read them, as well as the great drove of the
undiscriminating. For they are the product of thought: they show
workmanship; they have quality; they are carefully made. If the literary
critic never finds occasion to put off the shoes from his feet as in the
sacred presence of genius, he is constantly moved to recognize with a
friendly nod the presence of sterling talent. He is even inclined to
think that nobody else ever had so much talent as this little
red-haired, blue-eyed, high-nosed, dandified Edward Bulwer; the mere
mass of it lifts him at times to the levels where genius dwells, though
he never quite shares their nectar and ambrosia. He as it were catches
echoes of the talk of the Immortals,--the turn of their phrase, the
intonation of their utterance,--and straightway reproduces it with the
fidelity of the phonograph. But, as in the phonograph, we find something
lacking; our mind accepts the report as genuine, but our ear affirms an
unreality; this is reproduction, indeed, but not creation. Bulwer
himself, when his fit is past, and his critical faculty re-awakens,
probably knows as well as another that these labored and meritorious
pages of his are not graven on the eternal adamant. But they are the
best he can do, and perhaps there is none better of their kind. They
have a right to be; for while genius may do harm as well as good, Bulwer
never does harm, and in spite of sickly sentiment and sham philosophy,
is uniformly instructive, amusing, and edifying.

"To love her," wrote Dick Steele of a certain great dame, "is a liberal
education;" and we might almost say the same of the reading of Bulwer's
romances. He was learned, and he put into his books all his learning, as
well as all else that was his. They represent artistically grouped,
ingeniously lighted, with suitable acompaniments of music and
illusion--the acquisitions of his intellect, the sympathies of his
nature, and the achievements of his character.

He wrote in various styles, making deliberate experiments in one after
an