' 'A Strange Story,' 'The Coming Race,' and
'Kenelm Chillingly,' the last of which appeared in the year of the
author's death, 1873. The student who has read these books will know all
that is worth knowing of Bulwer's work. He wrote upwards of fifty
substantial volumes, and left a mass of posthumous material besides. Of
all that he did, the most nearly satisfactory thing is one of the last,
'Kenelm Chillingly.' In style, persons, and incidents it is alike
charming: it subsides somewhat into the inevitable Bulwer sentimentality
towards the end--a silk purse cannot be made out of a sow's ear; but the
miracle was never nearer being accomplished than in this instance. Here
we see the thoroughly equipped man of letters doing with apparent ease
what scarce five of his contemporaries could have done at all. The book
is lightsome and graceful, yet it touches serious thoughts: most
remarkable of all, it shows a suppleness of mind and freshness of
feeling more to be expected in a youth of thirty than in a veteran of
threescore and ten. Bulwer never ceased to grow; and what is better
still, to grow away from his faults and towards improvement.

But in comparing him with others, we must admit that he had better
opportunities than most. His social station brought him in contact with
the best people and most pregnant events of his time; and the driving
poverty of youth having established him in the novel-writing habit, he
thereafter had leisure to polish and expand his faculty to the utmost.
No talent of his was folded up in a napkin: he did his best and utmost
with all he had. Whereas the path of genius is commonly tortuous and
hard-beset: and while we are always saying of Shakespeare, or Thackeray,
or Shelley, or Keats, or Poe, "What wonders they would have done had
life been longer or fate kinder to them!"--of Bulwer we say, "No help
was wanting to him, and he profited by all; he got out of the egg more
than we had believed was in it!" Instead of a great faculty hobbled by
circumstance, we have a small faculty magnified by occasion and
enriched by time.

Certainly, as men of letters go, Bulwer must be accounted fortunate. The
long inflamed row of his domestic life apart, all things went his way.
He received large sums for his books; at the age of forty, his mother
dying, he succeeded to the Knebworth estate; three-and-twenty years
later his old age (if such a man could be called old) was consoled by
the title of Lord Lytton. His