men could get through. But such was Brougham's love of work--long
become a habit--that no amount of application seems to have been
too great for him; and such was his love of excellence, that it has
been said of him that if his station in life had been only that of
a shoe-black, he would never have rested satisfied until he had
become the best shoe-black in England.

Another hard-working man of the same class is Sir E. Bulwer Lytton.
Few writers have done more, or achieved higher distinction in
various walks--as a novelist, poet, dramatist, historian, essayist,
orator, and politician. He has worked his way step by step,
disdainful of ease, and animated throughout by the ardent desire to
excel. On the score of mere industry, there are few living English
writers who have written so much, and none that have produced so
much of high quality. The industry of Bulwer is entitled to all
the greater praise that it has been entirely self-imposed. To
hunt, and shoot, and live at ease,--to frequent the clubs and enjoy
the opera, with the variety of London visiting and sight-seeing
during the "season," and then off to the country mansion, with its
well-stocked preserves, and its thousand delightful out-door
pleasures,--to travel abroad, to Paris, Vienna, or Rome,--all this
is excessively attractive to a lover of pleasure and a man of
fortune, and by no means calculated to make him voluntarily
undertake continuous labour of any kind. Yet these pleasures, all
within his reach, Bulwer must, as compared with men born to similar
estate, have denied himself in assuming the position and pursuing
the career of a literary man. Like Byron, his first effort was
poetical ('Weeds and Wild Flowers'), and a failure. His second was
a novel ('Falkland'), and it proved a failure too. A man of weaker
nerve would have dropped authorship; but Bulwer had pluck and