rote:--"I feel more broken-hearted,
despondent, and sated than any old valetudinarian who has seen all his
old hopes and friends drop off one by one, and finds himself left for
the rest of his existence to the solitary possession of gloom and gout."
Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton fought fiercely to the last, and Edward determined to
close the matter; on August 29th, 1827, he married Rosina.

At first, in spite of, and even because of, the wild hostility of his
mother, the marriage seemed successful. The rage of the mother drove the
husband to the wife. Lord Lytton has noted that in later years all that
his grandfather and his grandmother said about one another was
unconsciously biassed by their memory of later complications. Neither
Bulwer-Lytton nor Rosina could give an accurate history of their
relations at the beginning, because the mind of each was prejudiced by
their knowledge of the end. Each sought to justify the hatred which both
had lived to feel, by representing the other as hateful from the first.
But the letters survive, and the recollections of friends, to prove that
this was entirely untrue. It must be admitted that their union was never
based upon esteem, but wholly upon passion, and that from the first they
lacked that coherency of relation, in moral respects, which was needed
to fix their affections. But those who have dimly heard how bitterly
these two unfortunate people hated one another in later life will be
astonished to learn that they spent the two first years together like
infatuated turtle-doves.

Their existence was romantic and absurd. Cut off from all support by the
implacable anger of old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, they depended on a combined
income of L380 a year and whatever the husband could make to increase
it. Accordingly they took a huge country house, Woodcot in Oxon, and
lived at the rate of several thousands a year. There they basked in an
affluent splendour of bad taste which reminds us of nothing in the world
so much as of those portions of _The Lady Flabella_ which Mrs.
Wititterly was presently to find so soft and so voluptuous. The
following extract from one of Rosina's lively letters-and she was a very
sprightly correspondent--gives an example of her style, of her husband's
Pelhamish extravagance, and of the gaudy recklessness of their manner of
life. They had now been married nearly two years:--

"How do you think my audacious husband has spent his time since he
has been in town? Why