aborated in 1861 with his friend Julian Fane in a poem,
_Tannhaeuser_, which, though too much of a Tennysonian echo, has good
passages; and after his death two volumes equal if not superior to
anything he had done, _Marah_, a collection of short poems, and _King
Poppy_, a fantastic epic, were published. This extensive and not always
easily accessible work is conveniently represented by two volumes of
selections, one representing chiefly the earlier and shorter works,
edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1890, the other drawn mostly from the
later and longer, edited by his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, in 1894.
This latter was accompanied by reprints of _The Wanderer_ and _Lucile_.

The difficulties in criticism above referred to arise, not merely from
the voluminousness of this work, nor from the fact that Lord Lytton
shares with all the poets of his special generation, except Rossetti,
that inability to hit upon a definite and distinct manner of his own
which is so frequently and strangely remarkable in what may be called
intermediate poetical periods. Indeed in his later years he did strike
out something like a very distinct style. But he suffers more than any
other poet of anything like his gifts from two faults, one of which is
perhaps the fault that hurts a poet most with the vulgar, and the other
that which does him most harm with critics. He was so frankly pleased
with, and so apt at imitating the work of his great contemporaries, that
he would publish things to which fools gave the name of
plagiarisms--when they were in fact studies in the manner of Tennyson,
Heine, Browning, and others. And in the second place, though he
frequently rewrote, it seemed impossible for him to retrench and
concentrate. To this may be added his fondness for extremely long
narrative poems, the taste for which has certainly gone out, while it
may be doubted whether, unless they are pure romances of adventure, they
are ever good things.

The consequence of all this, and perhaps of other things less
legitimately literary, such as political partnership, has hitherto been
that Lord Lytton has been ranked very far indeed below his proper place.
For he had two poetical gifts, the higher of them in a high, the lower
in an eminent degree. The first was the gift of true lyric, not seldom
indeed marred by the lack of polish above noticed, but real, true, and
constant, from the "Fata Morgana" and "Buried Heart" of _The Wanderer_
to the "Experientia