th, and was too sensitively conscious of the scandal,
to tell the story at all. We have the impression that, in order to
forestall any other biography, he pretended himself to write a book
which he was subtle enough to make unintelligible.

This baffling discretion, this feverish race from hiding-place to
hiding-place, has not only not been repeated by Lord Lytton in the new
_Life_, but the example of his father seems to have positively
emphasised his own determination to be straightforward and lucid. I know
no modern biography in which the writer has kept more rigidly to the
business of his narrative, or has less successfully been decoyed aside
by the sirens of family vanity. It must have been a great difficulty to
the biographer to find his pathway cumbered by the volumes of 1883, set
by his father as a plausible man-trap for future intruders. Lord
Lytton, however, is the one person who is not an intruder, and he was
the only possessor of the key which his father had so diplomatically
hidden. His task, however, was further complicated by the circumstance
that Bulwer-Lytton himself left in MS. an autobiography, dealing very
fully with his own career and character up to the age of twenty-two. The
redundancy of all the Lyttons is amazing. Bulwer-Lytton would not have
been himself if he had not overflowed into reflections which swelled his
valuable account of his childhood into monstrous proportions. Lord
Lytton, who has a pretty humour, tells an anecdote which will be read
with pleasure:--

"An old woman, who had once been one of Bulwer-Lytton's trusted
domestic servants, is still living in a cottage at Knebworth. One
day she was talking to me about my grandfather, and inadvertently
used an expression which summed him up more perfectly than any
elaborate description could have done. She was describing his house
at Copped Hall, where she had been employed as caretaker, and
added: 'In one of his attacks of _fluency_, I nursed him there for
many weeks.' 'Pleurisy,' I believe, was what she meant."

The bacillus of "_fluency_" interpenetrates the Autobiography, the
letters, the documents of every kind, and at any moment this disease
will darken Bulwer-Lytton's brightest hours. But curtailed by his
grandson, and with its floral and heraldic ornaments well pared away,
the Autobiography is a document of considerable value. It is written
with deliberate candour, and recalls the manner of