Haunted and the Haunters_
(1859).

Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many
merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department.
And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have
accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That
this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes
positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish,
half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is
probably true. But it is not all the truth: if it were, it would be
almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults
completely, the second almost completely; and that from _The Caxtons_
(1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary character in
any such respect. But other faults--or at least defects--remain. They
may be almost summed up in the charge of want of _consummateness_.
Bulwer could be romantic--but his romance had the touch of bad taste and
insincerity referred to above. He could, as in _The Caxtons_, be fairly
true to ordinary life--but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of
setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity
by touches--in fact by _douches_--of Sternian fantastry, and by other
touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even his
handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of
his, was not wholly _de ban aloi_. To pronounce him, as was once done by
an acute and amiable judge, "the _hum_miest of _bugs_" was excessive in
life, and would be preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly
was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang
"faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the
composition is _pastiche_; a dozen other metaphors--of stucco, veneer,
glueing-up--suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn,
a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of
work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment,
symptom, and pattern at once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing
Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the
very greatest.

It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism to
Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than ungrateful or more
ungrateful than uncritical. Because he has amused the boy, it seems to
be taken for granted that he ought not t