which Robert Lytton contrived to fill, that he was careful to contribute
as little as he possibly could to the story which he had started out to
relate. Although there is much that is interesting in the memoirs of
1883, the reader is continually losing the thread of the narrative. The
reason is, no doubt, that Robert Lytton stood too close to his parents,
had seen too much of their disputes, was too much torn by the agonies of
his own stormy youth, 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:--