d the bride had but partially recovered from an unhappy
attachment for a man beneath herself in rank,--in fact, a merchant's
son. But the marriage proved far from a happy one, and was closed after
a few years by the sudden death of General Bulwer. Our hero thus writes
of him:--

"Peace to thy dust, O my father! Faults thou hadst, but those
rather of temper than of heart,--of deficient education and the
manlike hardness of imperious will than of ungenerous disposition
or epicurean corruption. If thou didst fail to give happiness to
the woman whom thou didst love, many a good man is guilty of a
similar failure. It had been otherwise, I verily believe, hadst
thou chosen a partner of intellectual cultivation more akin to
thine own,--of hardier nerve and coarser fibre,--one whom thy wrath
would less have terrified, whom thy converse would more have
charmed; of less moral spirit and more physical courage."

Verily we are tempted to ask when we read of this marriage--as well as
of the son's own marriage and the marriages of many other members of the
English aristocracy whose domestic lives have latterly seen the light of
day--whether less of moral spirit and more of physical courage is not
the great need among women who aspire to the peerage. Strong nerves and
a martial spirit, if they could not secure peace, would at least place
the combatants upon a more equal footing, and the world would be spared
the spectacle of the mild-mannered and meek bullied by the overbearing
and violent.

As for Bulwer himself, he had the hot blood, imperious temper, and
remorseless will of the combined Bulwers and Lyttons; and, it must be
added, a vanity and egotism so boundless as to be peculiarly his own,
and an arrogance and superciliousness which throughout life were a
constant drawback, and which interfered materially with the
acknowledgment by the world of his really great powers.

At the early age of seventeen this precocious young man, who had already
been several years in society, felt his first sensations of love; and he
talked of it to the end of his days as being the one genuine passion of
his life. He tells the pretty story very feelingly, and no doubt it was
a genuine boyish romance. Hear him:--

"Ah, God! how palpably, even in hours the least friendly to
remembrance, there rises before me when I close my eyes that
singularly dwarfed tree which overshadowed the lit