Tremaine_ some thirty years
hence will be more read than _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_. If
Mr. Ward did not found the school of fashionable novelists, he was
certainly among the founders; and he infused into the best of his
works, _De Vere_, a real knowledge of Parliamentary life, a newer and
truer view of statesmen and nobles, though a little _en beau_, and a
great variety of actual characters. The circumstance of Wentworth's
supposed resemblance to Canning, and the accident of publication at
a time when the official conspiracy of the novel seemed acting in
Parliament, gave _De Vere_ a success with the world at large, which
its length and longwindedness might have marred. Mr. Ward's essays
(generally in the form of stories) were not so successful with the
public as his fictions. We think he was by nature designed for an
essayist--naturally given to discuss and expound; but nature had
denied him that penetrating originality of perception, that vigor of
thought, and (as a consequence) that terseness of style, which are
necessary to render the essay attractive and to preserve it. As
Robert Plumer Ward was essentially confined to the present, so he was
dependent on it; he was nothing if not in the mode, and in his later
works he rather fell behind the fashion.

His life as presented in these volumes was not very remarkable or
eventful. His father was a merchant at Gibraltar, and also held the
post of chief clerk of the civil department of the Ordnance in that
garrison: his mother was a Spanish Jewess. Robert Ward was born in
London, in 1765, on a visit of the family to England; and, after an
education at private schools, was sent to Oxford, in 1783. He left the
University in 1787, in debt; and soon after became a student of the
Inner Temple. An affection of the knee-joint sent him to Bareges: he
was speedily cured; but was so attracted by the pleasures of French
society, that he remained in France till the Revolution; from which he
had a narrow escape.

"It happened, unfortunately for him, that another 'Ward,' of
about the same age and personal appearance, had incurred the
suspicion of the Republican party, at a moment when suspicion
lost all its doubts, and death followed close upon the heels
of certainty. To use his own words, 'I was arrested for having
the same name and the same colored coat and waistcoat as
another Ward, guilty of treason; was ordered without trial to
Paris, to be gui