The foregoing extracts will make it obvious that Mr. Bulwer was at that time sore at the treatment he had received at the hands of certain of his critics, who were by no means unanimous in their estimation of his genius.  He was very sensitive at all times of adverse comment upon his writings.  Thackeray wounded him woefully when he made “Chawls Yellowplush” review him characteristically in Punch.  These most amusing papers ought to have been included in Thackeray’s published miscellaneous writings, but they were not, although Bulwer is humorously travestied in Punch’s “Prize Novelists,” together with Lover, Ainsworth, and Disraeli.  The subjoined will show the style of the “littery” footman, who, as a critic, “sumtimes gave kissis, sumtimes kix”: 

“One may objeck to an immence deal of your writings, witch, betwigst you and me, contain more sham sentiment, sham morallaty and sham potry than you’d like to own; but in spite of this, there’s the stuf you; you’ve a kind and loyal heart in your buzm, bar’net—­a trifle deboshed, praps:  a keen i, igspecially for what is comick (as for your tragady, it’s mighty flatchulent), and a ready pleasn’t pen.  The man who says you’re an As, is an As himself.  Dont b’lieve him, bar’net:  not that I suppose you will; for, if I’ve formed a correck opinion of you from your wuck, you think your small beear as good as most men’s.  Every man does—­and wy not?  We brew, and we love our own tap—­amen; but the pint betwigst us is this steupid, absudd way of crying out because the public don’t like it too.  Wy should they, my dear bar’net?  You may vow that they are fools, or that the critix are your enemies, or that the world should judge your poams by your critikle rules, and not by their own.  You may beat your brest, and vow that you are a martyr, but you won’t mend the matter.”

After these general remarks, the critic-footman takes up the subject of style, and argues with a good deal of ingenuity and force in favor of simplicity and terseness, especially in his performance of The Sea-Captain: 

“Sea-captings should not be eternly spowting, and invoking gods, hevn, starz, and angels, and other silestial influences.  We can all do it, bar’net:  no-think in life is easier.  I can compare my livery buttons to the stars, or the clouds of my backr pipe to the dark vollums that ishew from Mount Hetna; or I can say that angles are looking down from them, and the tobacco-silf, like a happy soil released, is circling round and upwards, and shaking sweetness down.  All this is as easy as to drink; but it’s not potry, bar’net, nor natral.  Pipple, when their mothers reckonise them, don’t howl about the suckumambient air, and paws to think of the happy leaves a-rustling—­leastways, one mistrusts them if they do...Look at the neat grammaticle twist of Lady Arundel’s spitch too, who in the cors of three lines has made her son a prince, a lion with a sword and coronal, and a star.  Wy gauble,