to secure
the rank of man of the world even more than that of man of letters,
taking the method chiefly of fashionable, and therefore somewhat
ephemeral, epigram. Nor did Bulwer (as he was known in the heyday of his
popularity) ever cease novel writing for the forty-five years which were
left to him, while the styles of his production varied with fashion in a
manner impossible to a man of less consummate versatility and talent,
though perhaps equally impossible to one of a very decided turn of
genius. The fashionable novel, the crime novel, the romance of mystery,
the romance of classical times, the historical novel, by turns occupied
him; and it is more easy to discover faults in _Paul Clifford_, _Eugene
Aram_, _The Pilgrims of the Rhine_, _The Last Days of Pompeii_, _Ernest
Maltravers_, _Zanoni_, _Rienzi_, _The Last of the Barons_, and _Harold_,
than to refuse admiration to their extraordinary qualities. Then their
author, recognising the public taste, as he always did, or perhaps
exemplifying it with an almost unexampled quickness, turned to the
domestic kind, which was at last, more than thirty years after Miss
Austen's death, forcing its way, and wrote _The Caxtons_, _My Novel_,
and _What will he do with it?_--books which to some have seemed his
greatest triumphs. The veering of that taste back again to tales of
terror was acknowledged by _A Strange Story_, which, in 1861, created an
excitement rarely, if ever, caused by the work of a man who had been
writing for more than a generation; while _The Haunted and the
Haunters_, a brief ghost-story contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_,
has always seemed to the present writer the most perfect thing that he
ever did, and one of the most perfect things of its kind ever done. In
the very last years of his life, the wonderful _girouette_ of his
imagination felt other popular gales, and produced--partly as novels of
actual society, partly as Janus-faced satires of what was and what might
be--_The Coming Race_, _Kenelm Chillingly_, and the posthumous
_Parisians_.

But this list of novels, which does not include by name much more than
two-thirds of his actual production, by no means exhausts Lord Lytton's
literary work. For some years, chiefly before he had passed middle
life, he was an active dramatist, and at least three of his plays--_The
Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_, and _Money_--had a success (not merely
passing, and in the first case at least permanent) which few if any