CHANGES IN WRITING.—­For a time he edited The New Monthly Magazine, and a change came over the spirit of his novels.  This was first noticed in his Ernest Maltravers, and the sequel, Alice, or the Mysteries, which are marked by sentimental passion and mystic ideas.  In Night and Morning he is still mysterious:  a blind fate seems to preside over his characters, robbing the good of its free merit and condoning the evil.

In 1838 he was made a baronet.  His versatile pen now turned to the drama; and although he produced nothing great, his Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, Money, and The Sea Captain have always since been favorites upon the stage, subsidizing the talents of actors like Macready, Kean, and Edwin Booth.

We must now chronicle another change, from the mystic to the supernatural, as displayed in Zanoni and Lucretia, and especially in A Strange Story, which is the strangest of all.  It was at the same period that he wrote The Last of the Barons, or the story of Warwick the king-maker, and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings.  Both are valuable to the student of English history as presenting the fruits of his own historic research.

The last and most decided, and, we may add, most beneficial, change in Bulwer as a writer, was manifested in his publication of the Caxtons, the chief merit of which is as an usher of the novels which were to follow.  Pisistratus Caxton is the modern Tristram Shandy, and becomes the putative editor of the later novels.  First of these is My Novel, or Varieties of English Life.  It is an admirable work:  it inculcates a better morality, and a sense of Christian duty, at which Pelham would have laughed in scorn.  Like it, but inferior to it, is What Will He do with It? which has an interesting plot, an elevated style, and a rare human sympathy.

Among other works, which we cannot mention, he wrote The New Timon, and King Arthur, in poetry, and a prose history entitled Athens, its Rise and Fall.

Without the highest genius, but with uncommon scholarship and great versatility, Bulwer has used the materials of many kinds lying about him, to make marvellous mosaics, which imitate very closely the finest efforts of word-painting of the great geniuses of prose fiction.

CHARLES DICKENS.—­Another remarkable development of the age was the use of prose fiction, instead of poetry, as the vehicle of satire in the cause of social reform.  The world consents readily to be amused, and it likes to be amused at the expense of others; but it soon tires of what is simply amusing or satirical unless some noble purpose be disclosed.  The novels of former periods had interested by the creation of character and scenes; and there had been numerous satires prompted by personal pique.  It is the glory of this latest age that it demands what shall so satirize the evil around it in men, in classes, in public institutions, that the evil shall recoil before the attack, and eventually disappear.  Chief among such reformers are Dickens and Thackeray.