CHAPTER XI.

SIR EDWARD GEORGE EARLE

BARONET.

LYTTON BULWER-LYTTON,

SUCH is the prolix and perplexing name and title of one of the foremost of our living writers. The confusion caused by this string of appellatives has been a long standing joke with the public, and even at this day it is not rare to find an admirer of "The Caxtons," and an enthusiastic defender of "The Rise and Fall of Athens," who is as ignorant of his favourite author's name as was the last of that series of footmen whom Thackeray has clothed with celebrity. Have you read "Bulwer's last ?" is a familiar enquiry to the ears of every one, and just now the usual answer is, "Ah, that queer stuff that is now coming out in Blackwood. Well-really-I can't yet see what he'll make of it; but everything that Bulwer writes must be good."

One of the great drawbacks of the present age of "action" to the young man is, that he is compelled by it to impudence and assumption, is forced to throw aside that habit of reverence, which is really congenial to generous youth, and to jostle, scan, measure, and judge his superiors, as though he were at last their equal. The young author may not rest content with admiring the great masters of his art, with feebly imitating them, and gratefully acknowledging the benefit of their instructions; other conduct is required of him-the pen is put in his hand and he is commanded to criticise. Nor is he allowed to use the pen to tell the deeper and more honourable feelings of his

heart; emotions of love, wonder, even of genial sympathy he must restrain, and in their place must foster a spirit of arrogant, and flippant self-sufficiency; by turns he must censure with a gibe and praise with a sneer, affect now a cold contempt and now an insulting pity. It is for him to point out not the author's beauties but his defects, not his patient research and general truthfulness, but his superficial errors and occasional failings. But it must be done! The bookseller cries for copy, and hunger cries for dinner.

By birth Bulwer Lytton was above the class from which the ranks of the literary profession are filled, for though not of a dazzling lineage he was on both sides of gentle origin. His father was General Bulwer, of Heydon Hall, Norfolk, (the son of a certain William Wigget who became possessed of considerable estates in Norfolk, on the death of a maternal uncle, William Bulwer, whose name he took) and his mother was an accomplished and richly endowed lady, with a remote collateral descent, through her grandmother and great-great-grandmother, from a daughter of the Lyttons of Knebworth, Hertfordshire, into the possession of which estate she came by unusual good fortune. General Bulwer had two children besides Edward, namely, William-Earle-Lytton, his eldest son and his heir, and Henry Lytton, his second son, the Privy Councillor and Diplomatist, who besides having represented the Court of St. James's at Madrid, and subsequently at Washington, has contributed to literature "An Autumn in Greece," "France, Social and Literary," "The Monarchy of the Middle Classes," and "A Life of Lord Byron."

General Bulwer died in 1807, leaving his young family to the care of their highly-endowed mother. Edward, the youngest, was born in 1805, and consequently was only about two years old at his father's death. There can be no doubt as to the singular precocity of the child's intellect

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for he was an author almost before he had mastered the art of constructing pot-hooks and hangers. When only five or six years old he wrote poems in imitation of Bishop Percy's ballads, and in 1820, when he was but just fifteen years old, he, or his vain friends for him, published his first volume of poems, entitled "Ismael, an Oriental Tale, with other Poems." Of course the verses of such a child are ridiculous enough in themselves, but they are remarkably good for so infantile a writer, and are an interesting proof of the care bestowed on his nursery education, and the industry which marked his earliest as well as all his after years. Perhaps the most amusing, and certainly not the least creditable poem in the collection, is one on "Waterloo," in which the deeds of the principal heroes are sung in strains which Pope and Homer between them inspired. The following sketch of the stalwart Shawe is a fair sample of the whole.

"Two British Heroes, of a meaner name,

That day shone proudly in the Field of Fame;
Immortal Thonne, and bold Herculean Shawe,
Before whose arms, with fear and wond'ring awe,
Proud Gallia shrunk; while gasping on the strand,
Nine chieftains fell by Thonne's destructive hand.

*

Mean time brave Shawe usurps the martial plain,
And spreads the field with Gallic heaps of slain ;
Where beams his sabre, wild confusion brings
Terror and death upon her iron wings;

A cuirassed band of Gallic heroes saw

His martial prowess with admiring awe.
And first Bernot withdrew his wond'ring eyes,
And thus the chief with indignation cries :-
"O friends! O Soldiers, shall the Gallic name

Rest, for a moment, in disgraceful shame ?

And shall yon Briton, glorying from afar,
Destroy our troops, and thin the ranks of war?

Frenchmen, charge forwards! and your king's applause,

Awaits your efforts in his glorious cause;

For he that sends yon haughty Briton's head,
A worthy off'ring to the noble dead,

Napoleon's self shall grace his radiant name,
And age to age perpetuate his fame.”

He ceas'd;—and warmed by hope, his legion broke
Through fires of sulphur, and through mists of smoke.”
Et-cetera, et-cetera.

As it was destined that these juvenile efforts were to see the light, the boy did well in publishing them without delay, when his age bore witness to the veracity of his assertion that they were composed between the age of thirteen and fifteen years. Some young gentlemen keep their nursery effusions in a box till they come of age, and then offer them to the public with their poem which did not get the prize at College, and their love sonnets of the last long vacation. The natural consequence of which step is, that ere long they pray the hills to hide them.

Bulwer Lytton was educated at private schools, or by private tutors, till he went to Cambridge, where as a fellow commoner of Trinity Hall, he became a personage of mark amongst the under-graduates of that noble university. As a young man of respectable family, and the probable heir of his mother's estate of Knebworth, and moreover as one holding in his veins a slight infiltration of the blood of the chivalric Lyttons, he naturally enough indulged in those dreary dissipations which the ingenuous youth of England hold to constitute "pleasure ;" but he was something more than an idle man, he read with regularity, and, like Macaulay and Tennyson, he ornamented his under-graduate career by successfully competing for the chancellor's prize medal for an English poem. The subject of the poem was " Sculpture," and Bulwer's verses, to which the medal was awarded in the summer of 1825, are rather above than below the average of such academical productions.

The passion for authorship was strong in the young man.

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He left Cambridge with the fixed ambition to achieve distinction in literature, and by patient study, and a plodding industry, rather than by his unquestionable genius, he has attained his object. At first he was disheartened by the difficulties of composition; and some idea may be formed of what these difficulties were, and of the stubborn resolution with which he defeated them, when it is said that he wrote and re-wrote some of his essays nine times over, and after all never published them, because he was unable to relieve them of their awkwardness of structure, and inelegancies of diction. He published, while still very young, another volume of puerile verses, called "Weeds and Wild Flowers," and in the following year (1827), he gave the world anonymously his first novel, "Falkland." The structure of this story is slight and in many places clumsy, and the incidents as well as the characters of the hero and heroine are of an exploded school of melodrama. Falkland," the hero, young, handsome, and richly endowed both in intellect and fortune, loves a beautiful Emily Mandeville, the young wife of a prosy, violent, and middle-aged member of parliament; he induces her to elope, but ere their Hegira their plans are discovered; the enraged husband seizes Emily rudely by the arm, shakes her, accuses her of her guilt, and hurls her from him; she falls on the ground and opportunely for the dramatic exigences bursts a blood-vessel; with a mad revulsion of feeling the husband lifts her from the ground, when lo! she is a corpse in his arms. Falkland hastens to Spain, gets his death-blow fighting for liberty, and dies exactly at the same moment of the four and twenty hours at which Emily expired; it was the half-hour after midnight!!! The tale, both as a whole and in its details is painful and revolting, its composition is replete with puerilities, and its sentiment is never vigorous save when it is extremely vicious. The hero is extravagantly Byronic, is utterly blasé (as the heroes of young writers usually are), despises the university in which