future Lady Lytton. Domestic
infelicity seems to have been the heritage of every one connected with
the Bulwer family even in the remotest manner.

And now it appears again in the family of the woman to whom the latest
scion of the old house is to be united. Bulwer's mother opposed the
match strenuously from the first. Her pride, her prudence, her
forebodings, and her motherly susceptibilities all rose up against it.
And she never gave her consent to it, or became really reconciled to it
after it had taken place. Although very unwilling to displease his
mother in so vital a matter, Bulwer seems to have gone steadily on to
such a consummation; not borne away certainly by strong passion, but
rather influenced, it would seem, by a tender regard for the feelings of
Miss Wheeler, who had grown much attached to him. Not without many a
struggle with himself, however, did he yield. He was tenderly attached
to his mother, and it was a great grief to him to do so important a
thing without her approval; and, moreover, his income and all his
worldly prospects depended upon her. He does not seem to have been
particularly happy over his own prospects, for in one of the last
letters he wrote before marriage he says:--

"My intended is very beautiful, very clever, very good; but, alas!
the human heart is inscrutable. I love and am loved. My heart is
satisfied, my judgment, too. And still I am wretched."

There have been published within a few years a great number of the
love-letters written by Bulwer to Miss Wheeler about this time. His son
publishes none of them in the late biography, and it is safe to say that
in all the range of literature there are no other letters filled with
such drivelling idiocy as these. Had they been written by some Cockney
coachman to some sentimental housemaid, they should stand as the finest
specimens of that grade of literature extant; but that they should have
been written by one of the foremost literary men of his time is a
marvel, and seems to show to what extremes of imbecility love may reduce
even wise men. As for Lady Lytton herself, one cares to know little more
than that she could have married a man who habitually addressed her as
his "sugar-plum," his "tootsy-wootsy," and his "sweety-weety." A woman
clothed and in her right mind, who could deliberately accept such a
personage for a life-long companion, calls for small sympathy from a
matter-of-fact world, unless, indeed, it be t