fford, Eugene Aram, and the Lady of Lyons? Is James, Mary
of Burgundy, Darnley, the Gipsy, and Corse de Leon? Is Dickens, Sam
Weller, Quilp, and Barnaby Rudge?--to what absurdities will this lead
us! and yet Bernard Cavanagh was no more guilty than any of these
gentlemen. He was, if I may so express it, a pictorial--an ideal
representation of a man that fasted: he narrated all the sensations
want of food suggests; its dreamy debility, its languid stupor, its
painful suffering, its stage of struggle and suspense, ending in a
victory, where the mind, the conqueror over the baser nature, asserts
its proud and glorious supremacy in the triumph of volition; and for
this beautiful creation of his brain he is sent to the treadmill, as
though, instead of a poet, he had been a pickpocket.

If Bulwer be a baronet; if Dickens' bed-room be papered with
bank-debentures; then do I proclaim it loudly before the world,
Bernard Cavanagh is an injured man: you are either absurd in one case,
or unjust in the other; take your choice. Ship off Sir Edward to the
colonies; send James to Swan River; let Lady Blessington card wool, or
Mrs. Norton pound oyster-shells; or else we call upon you, give Mr.
Cavanagh freedom of the guild; call him the author of "The Hungry
One;" let him be courted and _feted_--you may ask him to dinner with
an easy conscience, and invite him to tea without remorse. Let a
Whig-radical borough solicit him to represent it; place him at the
right hand of Lord John; let his picture be exhibited in the
print-shops, and let the cut of his coat and the tie of his cravat be
so much in vogue, that bang-ups _a la_ Barney shall be the only things
seen in Bond-street: one course or the other you must take. If the
mountain will not go to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain: or
in other words, if Bulwer descend not to Barney, Barney must mount up
to Bulwer. It is absurd, it is worse than absurd, to pretend that he
who so thoroughly sympathises with his hero, as to embody him in his
own thoughts and acts, his look, his dress, and his demeanour, that
he, I say, who so penetrated with the impersonation of a part, finds
the pen too weak, and the press too slow, to picture forth his vivid
creations, should be less an object of praise, of honour, and
distinction, than the indolent denizen of some drawing-room, who, in
slippered ease, dictates his shadowy and imperfect conceptions--visions
of what he never felt, dreamy representations