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 wrong track.

The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify this
unfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are even too eloquent, for
Bulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself with his own verbosity; they are meant
to be kind, they are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise and
dignified and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial narrative,