ook's
political squibs and light verses still retain attraction; and the
tradition of his extraordinary faculties in improvising both words,
music, and dramatic arrangement remains. But his novels (_Sayings and
Doings_, _Gilbert Gurney_, _Gurney Married_, _Maxwell_, etc.) have
become very dead-alive. They have little plot; a sort of rattling
adventure in a modernised following of Smollett, which is their chief
source of interest; manners true enough to their own day to be
out-of-date now, but not handled with sufficient art ever to regain the
attraction of revived antiquity; and a very careless and undistinguished
style.

The first series of Hook's _Sayings and Doings_ appeared in 1824, the
year before that of the novels of James and Ainsworth above noticed.
Three years later, and five before Scott's death, appeared _Falkland_,
the first (anonymous) novel of a writer far surpassing any of the hour
in talent, and credited by some with positive genius. Edward George
Earle Lytton Bulwer, afterwards Sir Edward Lytton-Bulwer, and later
still Lord Lytton (born in 1800), was the youngest son of General Bulwer
of Wood Dalling and Haydon in Norfolk, while he on his mother's side
represented an ancient Hertfordshire family seated at Knebworth. He was
a Cambridge man: he obtained the Chancellor's prize for English verse in
1825, and his first books were in poetical form. He became a Member of
Parliament, being returned in the Whig interest for St. Ives before the
Reform Bill passed, and in the first Reform Parliament for Lincoln, and
he held this seat for a decade, receiving his baronetcy in 1835. For
another decade he was out of the House of Commons, though he succeeded
to the Knebworth estate in 1844. He was returned for Hertfordshire in
1852, and, joining Lord Derby's reconstituted party, ranked for the rest
of his life as a Conservative of a somewhat Liberal kind. In the second
Derby administration he was Colonial Secretary, but took no part in that
of 1867, and died just before the return of the Tories to power in 1873.

This sufficiently brilliant political career was complicated by literary
production and success in a manner not equalled by any Englishman of his
time, and only approached by Macaulay and by Mr. Disraeli. _Falkland_
was succeeded by _Pelham_, which was published with his name, and which
was the first, perhaps the most successful, and by far the most
brilliant, of the novels in which authors have endeavoured