rs he produced twelve novels, two poems, a play,
"England and the English," and "Athens: Its Rise and Fall,"
besides an enormous number of shorter stories, essays, and
articles for contemporary periodicals. Altogether his output
is represented by nearly sixty volumes. Few books on their
publication have created a greater furore than Lord Lytton's
"Eugene Aram," which was published in 1832. One section of the
novel-reading public hailed its moving, dramatic story with
manifest delight, while the other severely condemned it on the
plea of its false morality. The story takes its title from
that remarkable scholar and criminal, Eugene Aram, at one time
a tutor in the Lytton family, who was executed at York in
1759, for a murder committed fourteen years before. The crime
caused much consternation at the time, Aram's refined and mild
disposition being apparently in direct contradiction to his
real nature. The novel is an unusually successful, though
perhaps one-sided psychological study. In a revised edition
Lytton made the narrative agree with his own conclusion that,
though an accomplice in robbery, Aram was not guilty of
premeditated or actual murder. Edward Bulwer Lytton died on
January 18, 1873.

_I.--At the Sign of the Spotted Dog_

In the county of ---- was a sequestered hamlet, to which I shall give
the name of Grassdale. It lay in a fruitful valley between gentle and
fertile hills. Its single hostelry, the Spotted Dog, was owned by one
Peter Dealtry, a small farmer, who was also clerk of the parish. On
summer evenings Peter was frequently to be seen outside his inn
discussing psalmody and other matters with Jacob Bunting, late a
corporal in his majesty's army, a man who prided himself on his
knowledge of the world, and found Peter's too easy fund of merriment
occasionally irritating.

On one such evening their discussion was interrupted by an
unprepossessing and travel-stained stranger, who, when his wants, none
too amiably expressed, had been attended to, exhibited a marked
curiosity concerning the people of the locality. As the stranger paid
for his welcome with a liberal hand, Peter became more than usually
communicative.

He described the lord of the manor, a distinguished nobleman who lived
at the castle some six miles away. He talked of the squire and his
household. "But," he continued, "the most notice