It must be confessed that, as a story, “Morton’s Hope” cannot endure a searching or even a moderately careful criticism.  It is wanting in cohesion, in character, even in a proper regard to circumstances of time and place; it is a map of dissected incidents which has been flung out of its box and has arranged itself without the least regard to chronology or geography.  It is not difficult to trace in it many of the influences which had helped in forming or deforming the mind of the young man of twenty-five, not yet come into possession of his full inheritance of the slowly ripening qualities which were yet to assert their robust independence.  How could he help admiring Byron and falling into more or less unconscious imitation of his moods if not of his special affectations?  Passion showing itself off against a dark foil of cynicism; sentiment, ashamed of its own self-betrayal, and sneering at itself from time to time for fear of the laugh of the world at its sincerity,—­how many young men were spoiled and how many more injured by becoming bad copies of a bad ideal!  The blood of Don Juan ran in the veins of Vivian Grey and of Pelham.  But if we read the fantastic dreams of Disraeli, the intellectual dandyisms of Bulwer, remembering the after careers of which these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the plastic period of their minds and characters.  Allow for all these influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; lay it aside as a complete failure in what it attempted to be, and read it, as “Vivian Grey” is now read, in the light of the career which it heralded.

“Morton’s Hope” is not to be read as a novel:  it is to be studied as an autobiography, a prophecy, a record of aspirations, disguised under a series of incidents which are flung together with no more regard to the unities than a pack of shuffled playing-cards.  I can do nothing better than let him picture himself, for it is impossible not to recognize the portrait.  It is of little consequence whether every trait is an exact copy from his own features, but it is so obvious that many of the lines are direct transcripts from nature that we may believe the same thing of many others.  Let us compare his fictitious hero’s story with what we have read of his own life.

In early boyhood Morton amused himself and astonished those about him by enacting plays for a puppet theatre.  This was at six years old, and at twelve we find him acting in a play with other boys, just as Motley’s playmates have already described him.  The hero may now speak for himself, but we shall all perceive that we are listening to the writer’s own story.