qualities with fatal defects. He aimed at the highest eminence, and
failed to reach it, but he was like an explorer, who is diverted from
the main ascent of a mountain, and yet annexes an important table-land
elsewhere. Bulwer-Lytton never secured the ungrudging praise of the best
judges, but he attained great popularity, and has even now not wholly
lost it. He is never quoted as one of our great writers, and yet he
holds a place of his own from which it is improbable that he will ever
be dislodged. Although he stood out prominently among his fellows, and
although his career was tinged with scandal and even with romance, very
little has been known about him. Curiosity has been foiled by the
discretion of one party and the malignity of another. The public has not
been in a position to know the truth, nor to possess the real portrait
of a politician and a man of letters who has been presented as an angel
and as a gargoyle, but never as a human being. Forty years after his
death the candour and the skill of his grandson reveal him to us at last
in a memoir of unusual excellence.

In no case would Lord Lytton's task have been an easy one, but it must
have been made peculiarly difficult by the work of those who had
preceded him. Of these, the only one who deserves serious attention is
Robert Lytton, who published certain fragments in 1883. That the son
wished to support the memory of his father is unquestionable. But it is
difficult to believe that he intended his contribution to be more than
an aid to some future biographer's labour. He scattered his material
about him in rough heaps. Apart from the "Literary Remains," which
destroyed the continuity of even such brief biography as he gave, Robert
Lytton introduced a number of chapters which are more or less of the
nature of essays, and are often quite foreign to his theme. Moreover, he
dedicated several chapters to literary criticism of his father's works.
It is, in fact, obvious to any one who examines the two volumes of 1883