ne cares to know what a man thinks of his own
actions. No one is interested to learn that Bulwer meant 'Paul Clifford'
to be an edifying work, or that he married his wife from the highest
motives. We do not take him so seriously: we are satisfied that he wrote
the story first and discovered its morality afterwards; and that lofty
motives would not have united him to Miss Rosina Doyle Wheeler had she
not been pretty and clever. His hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic
struttings and mouthings over the grave of his schoolgirl lady-love; his
eighteenth-century comedy-scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill
participation in the Fred Villiers duel at Boulogne,--how silly and
artificial is all this! There is no genuine feeling in it: he attires
himself in tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat. What a
difference between him, at this period, and his contemporary Benjamin
Disraeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with a saturnine
sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole
complexion of the performance. We laugh at the one, but with
the other.

[Illustration: BULWER-LYTTON.]

Of course, however, there was a man hidden somewhere in Edward Bulwer's
perfumed clothes and mincing attitudes, else the world had long since
forgotten him. Amidst his dandyism, he learned how to speak well in
debate and how to use his hands to guard his head; he paid his debts by
honest hard work, and would not be dishonorably beholden to his mother
or any one else. He posed as a blighted being, and invented black
evening-dress; but he lived down the scorn of such men as Tennyson and
Thackeray, and won their respect and friendship at last. He aimed high,
according to his lights, meant well, and in the long run did well too.

The main activities of his life--and from start to finish his energy was
great--were in politics and in literature. His political career covers
about forty years, from the time he took his degree at Cambridge till
Lord Derby made him a peer in 1866. He accomplished nothing of serious
importance, but his course was always creditable: he began as a
sentimental Radical and ended as a liberal Conservative; he advocated
the Crimean War; the Corn Laws found him in a compromising humor; his
record as Colonial Secretary offers nothing memorable in statesmanship.
The extraordinary brilliancy of his brother Henry's diplomatic life
throws Edward's achievements into the shade. There is nothing to