hould not have had;
they have almost as certainly, and in no case much more certainly than
in Bulwer's, over-forced and over-coaxed into hasty and ephemeral
production talents which, with a little more hardening and under less
exacting circumstances, might have become undoubted genius. Sentimental
grandiloquence is not by itself fatal: the fashion which tempts to it,
which turns on it, may return to it again; and it is never impossible to
make allowance for its excesses, especially when, as in the case under
discussion, it is accompanied by a rare and true satiric grasp of life.
In these early externals of his, Bulwer was only the most illustrious of
the innumerable victims of Byron. But his failure to make his figures
thoroughly alive is more serious; and this must be put down partly to
incapacity to take pains.

It was nearly ten years after the first success of Bulwer, and more than
half as much after the death of Scott, that a novelist greater than any
the century had seen, except Scott himself and Miss Austen, appeared.
Charles Dickens and Lord Lytton became rather intimate friends; but
their origins and early experiences were curiously different. Dickens'
father had been in a government office; but after the Peace he took to
the press, and his son (born in 1812), after some uncomfortable early
experiences which have left their mark on _David Copperfield_, fled to
the same refuge of the destitute in our times. He was a precocious, but
not an extraordinary precocious writer; for he was four and twenty when
the _Sketches by Boz_ were printed in a volume after appearing in the
_Morning Chronicle_. But the _Sketches_ _by Boz_, though containing
some very sprightly things, are but as farthing candles to sunlight when
compared with the wonderful and wholly novel humour of _The Pickwick
Papers_, which (Dickens having been first (1836) employed to write them
as mere letter-press to the sporting sketches of the caricaturist
Seymour) appeared as a book in 1838. From that time their author had a
success which in money came second to that of Scott, and which both
pecuniarily and otherwise enabled him to write pretty much as he
pleased. So to the last the style of his novels never bore much
reference to any public taste or demand; and he developed himself more
strictly according to his own bent than almost any writer of English who
was not born to fortune. During the last twenty years of his life, which
ended suddenly on 9th Ju