wrong track.

The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify this
unfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are even too eloquent, for
Bulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself with his own verbosity; they are meant
to be kind, they are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise and
dignified and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial narrative,
that they scarcely ever failed to exasperate the receiver. His dealings
with his son, of whom he was exquisitely proud and sensitively fond, are
of the saddest character, because of the father's want of comprehension,
haste of speech and intolerance of temper. The very fact that a son, a
wife, or a mother could with impunity be addressed in terms of
exaggerated sensibility, because there could be no appeal, was a snare
to the too-ready pen of Bulwer-Lytton, which, poured out its oceans of
ink without reflection and without apprehension. If violent offence were
given, the post went out again later in the day, and equally violent
self-humiliation would restore the emotional balance. But what could not
be restored was the sense of confidence and domestic security.

In his contact with other literary men of his own age more restraint was
necessary, and we learn from Lord Lytton's pages of valuable and
prolonged acquaintanceships which were sometimes almost friendships. His
company was much sought after, and occasionally by very odd persons.
Lord Lytton prints a series of most diverting letters from the notorious
Harriette Wilson, who, in spite of the terror into which her "Memoirs"
had thrown society, desired to add the author of _Pelham_ to the aviary
of her conquests. But the snare was set in vain before the eyes of so
shrewd a bird as Bulwer-Lytton; he declined to see the lady, but he kept
her amazing letters. This was in 1829, when the novelist seems to have
had no literary or political associates. But by 1831, we find him
editing the _New Monthly Magazine_, and attaching himself to Lord
Melbourne and Lord Durham on the one hand and to Disraeli and Dickens on
the other. When to these we have added Lady Blessington and Letitia
Landon, we have mentioned all those public persons with whom
Bulwer-Lytton seems to have been on terms of intimacy during his early
manhood. All through these years he was an incessant diner-out and
party-goer, and the object of marvellous adulation, but he passed
through all this social parade as though it had been a necessary portion