The main activities of his life—­and from start to finish his energy was great—­were in politics and in literature.  His political career covers about forty years, from the time he took his degree at Cambridge till Lord Derby made him a peer in 1866.  He accomplished nothing of serious importance, but his course was always creditable:  he began as a sentimental Radical and ended as a liberal Conservative; he advocated the Crimean War; the Corn Laws found him in a compromising humor; his record as Colonial Secretary offers nothing memorable in statesmanship.  The extraordinary brilliancy of his brother Henry’s diplomatic life throws Edward’s achievements into the shade.  There is nothing to be ashamed of, but had he done nothing else he would have been unknown.  But literature, first seriously cultivated as a means of livelihood, outlasted his political ambitions, and his books are to-day his only claim to remembrance.  They made a strong impression at the time they were written, and many are still read as much as ever, by a generation born after his death.  Their popularity is not of the catchpenny sort; thoughtful people read them, as well as the great drove of the undiscriminating.  For they are the product of thought:  they show workmanship; they have quality; they are carefully made.  If the literary critic never finds occasion to put off the shoes from his feet as in the sacred presence of genius, he is constantly moved to recognize with a friendly nod the presence of sterling talent.  He is even inclined to think that nobody else ever had so much talent as this little red-haired, blue-eyed, high-nosed, dandified Edward Bulwer; the mere mass of it lifts him at times to the levels where genius dwells, though he never quite shares their nectar and ambrosia.  He as it were catches echoes of the talk of the Immortals,—­the turn of their phrase, the intonation of their utterance,—­and straightway reproduces it with the fidelity of the phonograph.  But, as in the phonograph, we find something lacking; our mind accepts the report as genuine, but our ear affirms an unreality; this is reproduction, indeed, but not creation.  Bulwer himself, when his fit is past, and his critical faculty re-awakens, probably knows as well as another that these labored and meritorious pages of his are not graven on the eternal adamant.  But they are the best he can do, and perhaps there is none better of their kind.  They have a right to be; for while genius may do harm as well as good, Bulwer never does harm, and in spite of sickly sentiment and sham philosophy, is uniformly instructive, amusing, and edifying.

“To love her,” wrote Dick Steele of a certain great dame, “is a liberal education;” and we might almost say the same of the reading of Bulwer’s romances.  He was learned, and he put into his books all his learning, as well as all else that was his.  They represent artistically grouped, ingeniously lighted, with suitable acompaniments of music and illusion—­the acquisitions of his intellect, the sympathies of his nature, and the achievements of his character.