note so dear to plain humanity.  In his pilgrimage toward freedom he had to wrestle not only with flesh-and-blood mothers, uncles, and wives, et id genus omne, but with the more subtle and vital ideas, superstitions, and prejudices appertaining to his social station.  His worst foes were not those of his household merely, but of his heart.  The more arduous achievement of such a man is to see his real self and believe in it.  There are so many misleading purple-velvet waistcoats, gold chains, superfine sentiments, and blue-blooded affiliations in the way, that the true nucleus of so much decoration becomes less accessible than the needle in the hay-stack.  It is greatly to Bulwer’s credit that he stuck valiantly to his quest, and nearly, if not quite, ran down his game at last.  His intellectual record is one of constant progress, from childhood to age.

Whether his advance in other respects was as uniform does not much concern us.  He was unhappy with his wife, and perhaps they even threw things at each other at table, the servants looking on.  Nothing in his matrimonial relations so much became him as his conduct after their severance:  he held his tongue like a man, in spite of the poor lady’s shrieks and clapper-clawings.  His whimsical, hair-splitting conscientiousness is less admirable.  A healthy conscience does not whine—­it creates.  No one cares to know what a man thinks of his own actions.  No one is interested to learn that Bulwer meant ‘Paul Clifford’ to be an edifying work, or that he married his wife from the highest motives.  We do not take him so seriously:  we are satisfied that he wrote the story first and discovered its morality afterwards; and that lofty motives would not have united him to Miss Rosina Doyle Wheeler had she not been pretty and clever.  His hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic struttings and mouthings over the grave of his schoolgirl lady-love; his eighteenth-century comedy-scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill participation in the Fred Villiers duel at Boulogne,—­how silly and artificial is all this!  There is no genuine feeling in it:  he attires himself in tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat.  What a difference between him, at this period, and his contemporary Benjamin Disraeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with a saturnine sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole complexion of the performance.  We laugh at the one, but with the other.

[Illustration:  BULWER-LYTTON.]

Of course, however, there was a man hidden somewhere in Edward Bulwer’s perfumed clothes and mincing attitudes, else the world had long since forgotten him.  Amidst his dandyism, he learned how to speak well in debate and how to use his hands to guard his head; he paid his debts by honest hard work, and would not be dishonorably beholden to his mother or any one else.  He posed as a blighted being, and invented black evening-dress; but he lived down the scorn of such men as Tennyson and Thackeray, and won their respect and friendship at last.  He aimed high, according to his lights, meant well, and in the long run did well too.