with Ernest Maltravers and Alice; the historic romance with The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold (1848), he made marks deep and early.  When the purely domestic kind came in he made them, earlier and deeper still, with The Caxtons (1850), My Novel (1853), etc.  He caught the “sensation” ball at nearly its first service with his old “mystery” racket, and played the most brilliant game of the whole tournament in A Strange Story (1862).  At the last he tried later kinds still in books like The Coming Race (1871), The Parisians (1873), and Kenelm Chillingly.  And once, Pallas being kind, he did an almost perfect thing (there is not a speck or a flaw in it except, perhaps, the mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one of the best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction known to the world, in the ghost-story of The Haunted and the Haunters (1859).

Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department.  And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist.  That this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish, half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is probably true.  But it is not all the truth:  if it were, it would be almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults completely, the second almost completely; and that from The Caxtons (1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary character in any such respect.  But other faults—­or at least defects—­remain.  They may be almost summed up in the charge of want of consummateness.  Bulwer could be romantic—­but his romance had the touch of bad taste and insincerity referred to above.  He could, as in The Caxtons, be fairly true to ordinary life—­but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity by touches—­in fact by douches—­of Sternian fantastry, and by other touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism.  Even his handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of his, was not wholly de ban aloi.  To pronounce him, as was once done by an acute and amiable judge, “the hummiest of bugs” was excessive in life, and would be preposterous in literature.  But there undoubtedly was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang “faking” about his work.  The wine is not “neat” but doctored; the composition is pastiche; a dozen other metaphors—­of stucco, veneer, glueing-up—­suggest themselves.  And then there suggests itself, in turn, a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment, symptom, and pattern at once.  And perhaps one may end by pronouncing Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the very greatest.