HE patrician in literature is always

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an interesting spectacle. We are prone to regard his performance as a test of the worth of long descent and high breeding. If he does well, he vindicates the claims of his caste; if ill, we infer that inherited estates and blue blood are but surface advantages, leaving the effective brain unimproved, or even causing deterioration. But the argument is still open and whether genius be the creature of circumstance or divinely independent, is a question which prejudice rather than evidence commonly decides.

Certainly literature tries men's souls. The charlatan must betray himself. Genius shines through all cerements. On the other hand, genius may be nourished, and the charlatan permeates all classes. The truth probably is that an aristocrat is quite as apt as a plebeian to be a good writer. Only since there are fewer of the former than of the latter. and since, unlike the last, the first are seldom forced to live by their brains, there are more plebeian than aristocratic names on the literary roll of honor. Admitting this, the instance of the writer known as "Bulwer" proves nothing one way or the other. At all events, not, Was he a genius because he was a patrician? but, Was he a genius at all? is the inquiry most germane to our present purpose.

On both father's and mother's side he was thoroughly well connected. The historic background of each family was honorable, and when the marriage of William Earle Bulwer with Elizabeth Barbara Lytton united them, it might be said that in their offspring England found her type.

Edward, being the youngest son, had little money, but he happened to have brains. He began existence delicate and precocious. Culture, with him, set in almost with what he would have termed the "consciousness of his own identity," and the process never intermitted: in fact, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, his spiritual and intellectual emancipation was hindered by many obstacles; for, an ailing child, he was petted by his mother, and such germs of intelligence (verses at seven years old and the like) as he betrayed were trumpeted as prodigies. He was spoilt so long before he was ripe that it is a marvel he ever ripened at all. Many years must pass before vanity could be replaced in him by manly ambition; a vein of silliness is traceable through his career almost to the end. He expatiated in the falsetto key; almost never do we hear in his voice that hearty bass note so dear to plain humanity. In his pilgrimage toward freedom he had to wrestle not

only with flesh-and-blood mothers, uncles and wives, et id genus omne, but with the more subtle and vital ideas, superstitions and prejudices appertaining to his social station. His worst foes were not those of his household merely, but of his heart. The more arduous achievement of such a man is to see his real self and believe in it. There are so many misleading purplevelvet waistcoats, gold chains, superfine sentiments, and blue-blooded affiliations in the way, that the true nucleus of so much decoration becomes less accessible than the needle in the hay-stack. It is greatly to Bulwer's credit that he stuck. valiantly to his quest, and nearly, if not quite, ran down his game at last. His intellectual record is one of constant progress, from childhood to age.

Whether his advance in other respects was as uniform does not much concern us. He was unhappy with his wife, and perhaps they even threw things at each other at table, the servants looking on. Nothing in his matrimonial relations so much became him as his conduct after their severance; he held his tongue like a man, in spite of the poor lady's shrieks and clapper-clawings. His whimsical, hair-splitting conscientiousness is less admirable. A healthy conscience does not whine-it creates.

His hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic struttings and mouthings over the grave of his schoolgirl lady love; his eighteenth century comedy scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill participation in the Fred Villiers duel at Boulogne-how silly and artificial is all this! There is no genuine feeling in it; he attires himself in tawdry sentiment, as in a flowered waistcoat. What a difference between him, at this period, and his contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with at saturnine sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole complexion of the performance. We laugh at the one, but with the other.

Of course, however, there was a man hidden somewhere in Edward Bulwer's perfumed clothes and mincing attitudes, else the world had long since forgotten him. Amidst his dandyism, he learned how to speak well in debate and how to use his hands to guard his head; he paid his debts by honest hard work, and would not be dishonorably beholden to his mother or any one else. He posed as a blighted being, and invented black evening-dress; but he lived down the scorn of such men as Tennyson and Thackeray, and won their respect and friendship at last. He aimed high, according to his lights, meant well, and in the long run did well, too.

Literature, first seriously cultivated as a means of livelihood, outlasted his political ambitions, and his books are to-day his only claim to remembrance. They made a strong impression at the time. they were written, and many are still read as much as ever by a generation born after his death. Their popularity is not of the catchpenny sort; thoughtful people read them, as well as the great drove of the undiscriminating. For they are the product of thought: they show workmanship; they have quality; they are carefully made. If the literary critic never finds occasion to put off the shoes from his feet as in the sacred presence of genius, he is constantly moved to recognize with a friendly nod the presence of sterling talent. He is even inclined to think that nobody else ever had so much. talent as this little red-haired, blue-eyed, high-nosed, dandified Edward Bulwer; the mere mass of it lifts him at times to the levels where genius dwells, though he never quite shares their nectar and ambrosia. He, as it were, catches echoes of the talk of the Immortals-the turn of their phrase, the intonation of their utterance and straightway reproduces it with the fidelity of the phonograph. But, as in the phonograph, we find something lacking, our minds accept the