e slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry the
sober record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott alone may be
held to have equalled it. The giants of popular fiction did, indeed,
enjoy larger single successes than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them,
not Dickens himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote
sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. Even his
poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, always sold. He did
not know what failure was; he made money by _Devereux_; even _The New
Timon_ went into many editions. To earn what was required, however--and
in these early years he seems to have made L3000 his minimum of needful
return--to live in the insane style which his wife and he demanded, an
enormous nervous strain was required. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper had
always been warm and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree.
His mother continued to exasperate him; his wife suddenly failed to
please him; his health waned; and he became the most miserable of men;
yet without ceasing for a moment to be the most indefatigable of
authors. The reader will follow the evolution of the tragedy, which is
of poignant interest, in Lord Lytton's pages. The whole story is one of
the most extraordinary in the history of literature.

It has been a feature of Bulwer-Lytton's curious posthumous fortune that
he has seemed solitary in his intellectual if not in his political and
social action. We think of him as one of those morose and lonely bees
that are too busy gathering pollen to join the senate of the hive, and
are dwellers in the holes of the rocks. It is quite true that, with a
painful craving for affection, he had not the genius of friendship. The
general impression given by his biography is one of isolation; in "the
sea of life" he was one of those who are most hopelessly "enisled."
Nothing is sadder than this severance of a delicate and sensitive
temperament from those who surround it closely and to whom it stretches
out its arms in vain. But a careful reading of these interesting volumes
leaves us in no doubt of the cause of this loneliness. Bulwer-Lytton,
with all his ardour and his generosity, was devoid of the gift of
sympathy. In characters of a simpler mould a natural kindliness may take
the place of comprehension. But Bulwer-Lytton had a lively and protean
fancy which perpetually deceived him. In human relations he was always
moving, but always on the