health was never robust, and occasionally
failed; but he seems to have been able to accomplish after a fashion
everything that he undertook; he was "thorough," as the English say. He
lived in the midst of events; he was a friend of the men who made the
age, and saw them make it, lending a hand himself too when and where he
could. He lived long enough to see the hostility which had opposed him
in youth die away, and honor and kindness take its place. Let it be
repeated, his aims were good. He would have been candid and
un-selfconscious had that been possible for him; and perhaps the failure
was one of manner rather than of heart.--Yes, he was a fortunate man.

His most conspicuous success was as a play-writer. In view of his
essentially dramatic and historic temperament, it is surprising that he
did not altogether devote himself to this branch of art; but all his
dramas were produced between his thirty-third and his thirty-eighth
years. The first--'La Duchesse de la Valliere' was not to the public
liking; but 'The Lady of Lyons,' written in two weeks, is in
undiminished favor after near sixty years; and so are 'Richelieu' and
'Money.' There is no apparent reason why Bulwer should not have been as
prolific a stage-author as Moliere or even Lope de Vega. But we often
value our best faculties least.

'The Coming Race,' published anonymously and never acknowledged during
his life, was an unexpected product of his mind, but is useful to mark
his limitations. It is a forecast of the future, and proves, as nothing
else could so well do, the utter absence in Bulwer of the creative
imagination. It is an invention, cleverly conceived, mechanically and
rather tediously worked out, and written in a style astonishingly
commonplace. The man who wrote that book (one would say) had no heaven
in his soul, nor any pinions whereon to soar heavenward. Yet it is full
of thought and ingenuity, and the central conception of "vrii" has been
much commended. But the whole concoction is tainted with the deadness of
stark materialism, and we should be unjust, after all, to deny Bulwer
something loftier and broader than is discoverable here. In inventing
the narrative he depended upon the weakest element in his mental
make-up, and the result could not but be dismal. We like to believe that
there was better stuff in him than he himself ever found; and that when
he left this world for the next, he had sloughed off more dross than
most men have time t