in some curious sports and by-products, he ever produced real novel-work of the highest class.  In the satiric-fantastic tale—­in a kind of following of Voltaire—­such as Ixion, he has hardly a superior, unless it be Anthony Hamilton, who is the superior of Voltaire himself and the master of everybody.  For a pure love-novel of a certain kind, Henrietta Temple (1837) is bad to beat—­and in a curious cross between the historical, biographical, and the romantic, Venetia (same year) also stands pretty much alone.  But all the rest, more or less political, more or less “of society,” more or less fantastic—­Coningsby (1844) as well as Alroy (1833), Tancred (1847) as well as Vivian Grey, Sybil (1845), as well as The Young Duke (1831), “leave to desire” in a strange way.  Like the three which have been excepted for praise, each is in a manner sui generis, while the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by itself.  There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to epigrammatic phrase.  But the whole is inorganic somehow, and more than somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers of fiction have managed to put in existence and motion.  How far this is due to the fact that most of the novels are political is a question rather to be hinted than to be discussed.  But the present writer has never read a political novel, whether on his own side or on others, that seemed to him to be wholly satisfactory.

Bulwer—­for it is perhaps here not impolite or improper still to call the first Lord Lytton by the name under which he wrote for forty years, and solidly niched himself in the novel-front of the minster of English Literature—­had not a few points of resemblance to his rival and future chief.  But their relations to politics and letters were reversed.  Disraeli was a born politician who was also a very considerable man of letters:  Bulwer was a born man of letters who was a by no means inconsiderable politician.  His literary ability was extraordinarily diversified:  but, once more, he was (here also) a born novelist, who was also a not inconsiderable dramatist; a critic who might not impossibly have been great, a miscellanist of ability, and a verse-writer than whom many a worse has somehow or other obtained the name of poet.  He began novel-writing very early (Falkland is of 1827), he continued it all his life, and he was the very Proteus-chameleon of the novel in changing his styles to suit the tastes of the day.  He never exactly copied anybody:  and in all his various attempts he went extremely near to the construction of masterpieces.  In the novel of society with Pelham (1828); the novel of crime with Eugene Aram (1832) and Zanoni (1842); the novel of passion and a sort of mystery