ward Bulwer
was an imposing figure in the history of nineteenth century
fiction. Throughout his life, in spite of political and social
distractions and of matrimonial disaster, he continued to engage
with unwearying industry in literary work. He was not a man of
genius in whom the creative impulse found its own expression, but
a versatile and accomplished gentleman who could direct his
talents into any channel he pleased. Essays, translations,
verses, plays, novels flowed from his pen in rapid succession,
and he won his meed of applause and fame, as well as his share of
execration and derision, in his own lifetime. Quick to discern
the popular taste of the hour, and eager to gratify it, Lytton,
with the resourceful agility of a lightning impersonator, turns
in his novels from Wertherism to dandyism, from criminal
psychology to fairy folk-lore, from historical romance to
domestic romance, from pseudo-philosophic occultism to
pseudo-scientific fantasy. He ranges at will in the past, the
present or the future, consorting indifferently with impalpable
wraiths, Vrilya or mysterious Sages. It is to his credit that
this unusual gift of adaptability does not result in
incompetency. Though he attempts a variety of manners, it must in
justice be acknowledged that he does most of them well. He
constructs his plots with laborious art, and pays a deliberate,
if sometimes misguided, attention to style. When he fails, it is
less from lack of effort than from over-elaboration and excess of
zeal.

Bulwer Lytton's predilection for the supernatural was neither a
theatrical pose nor a passing folly excited by the fashionable
craze for psychical research, but a genuine and enduring
interest, inherited, it may be, from his ancestor, the learned,
eccentric savant, Dr. Bulwer, who studied the Black Art and
dabbled in astrology and palmistry. He was a member of the
society of Rosicrucians, and, to quote the words of his grandson,
"he certainly did not study magic for the sake of writing about
it, still less did he write about it, without having studied it,
merely for the sake of making his readers' flesh creep." From his
early years Lytton seems to have been keenly interested in
supernatural manifestations. He was inspired by the deserted
rooms at the end of a long gallery in Knebworth House to set down
the story of the ghost, Jenny Spinner, who was said to haunt
them; and the concealed chamber in _The Haunted and the Haunters_
may have be