"An old woman, who had once been one of Bulwer-Lytton's trusted
domestic servants, is still living in a cottage at Knebworth. One
day she was talking to me about my grandfather, and inadvertently
used an expression which summed him up more perfectly than any
elaborate description could have done. She was describing his house
at Copped Hall, where she had been employed as caretaker, and
added: 'In one of his attacks of _fluency_, I nursed him there for
many weeks.' 'Pleurisy,' I believe, was what she meant."

The bacillus of "_fluency_" interpenetrates the Autobiography, the
letters, the documents of every kind, and at any moment this disease
will darken Bulwer-Lytton's brightest hours. But curtailed by his
grandson, and with its floral and heraldic ornaments well pared away,
the Autobiography is a document of considerable value. It is written
with deliberate candour, and recalls the manner of Cobbett, a writer
with whom we should not expect to find Bulwer-Lytton in sympathy. It is
probable that the author of it never saw himself nor those who
surrounded him in precisely their true relation. There was something
radically twisted in his image of life, which always seems to have
passed through a refracting surface on its way to his vision. No doubt
this is more or less true of all experience; no power has given us the
gift "to see ourselves as others see us." But in the case of
Bulwer-Lytton this refractive habit of his imagination produced a
greater swerving aside from positive truth than is usual. The result is
that an air of the fabulous, of the incredible, is given to his
narratives, and often most unfairly.

A close examination, in fact, of the Autobiography results in confirming
the historic truth of it. What is surprising is not, when we come to