" cannot endure a
searching or even a moderately careful criticism. It is wanting in
cohesion, in character, even in a proper regard to circumstances of time
and place; it is a map of dissected incidents which has been flung out of
its box and has arranged itself without the least regard to chronology or
geography. It is not difficult to trace in it many of the influences
which had helped in forming or deforming the mind of the young man of
twenty-five, not yet come into possession of his full inheritance of the
slowly ripening qualities which were yet to assert their robust
independence. How could he help admiring Byron and falling into more or
less unconscious imitation of his moods if not of his special
affectations? Passion showing itself off against a dark foil of cynicism;
sentiment, ashamed of its own self-betrayal, and sneering at itself from
time to time for fear of the laugh of the world at its sincerity,--how
many young men were spoiled and how many more injured by becoming bad
copies of a bad ideal! The blood of Don Juan ran in the veins of Vivian
Grey and of Pelham. But if we read the fantastic dreams of Disraeli, the
intellectual dandyisms of Bulwer, remembering the after careers of which
these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be
something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way
of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the
plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these
influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his
familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the
story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; lay it
aside as a complete failure in what it attempted to be, and read it, as
"Vivian Grey" is now read, in the light of the career which it heralded.

"Morton's Hope" is not to be read as a novel: it is to be studied as an
autobiography, a prophecy, a record of aspirations, disguised under a
series of incidents which are flung together with no more regard to the
unities than a pack of shuffled playing-cards. I can do nothing better
than let him picture himself, for it is impossible not to recognize the
portrait. It is of little consequence whether every trait is an exact
copy from his own features, but it is so obvious that many of the lines
are direct transcripts from nature that we may believe the same thing of
many others. Let us compare his