But in comparing him with others, we must admit that he had better opportunities than most.  His social station brought him in contact with the best people and most pregnant events of his time; and the driving poverty of youth having established him in the novel-writing habit, he thereafter had leisure to polish and expand his faculty to the utmost.  No talent of his was folded up in a napkin:  he did his best and utmost with all he had.  Whereas the path of genius is commonly tortuous and hard-beset:  and while we are always saying of Shakespeare, or Thackeray, or Shelley, or Keats, or Poe, “What wonders they would have done had life been longer or fate kinder to them!”—­of Bulwer we say, “No help was wanting to him, and he profited by all; he got out of the egg more than we had believed was in it!” Instead of a great faculty hobbled by circumstance, we have a small faculty magnified by occasion and enriched by time.

Certainly, as men of letters go, Bulwer must be accounted fortunate.  The long inflamed row of his domestic life apart, all things went his way.  He received large sums for his books; at the age of forty, his mother dying, he succeeded to the Knebworth estate; three-and-twenty years later his old age (if such a man could be called old) was consoled by the title of Lord Lytton.  His health was never robust, and occasionally failed; but he seems to have been able to accomplish after a fashion everything that he undertook; he was “thorough,” as the English say.  He lived in the midst of events; he was a friend of the men who made the age, and saw them make it, lending a hand himself too when and where he could.  He lived long enough to see the hostility which had opposed him in youth die away, and honor and kindness take its place.  Let it be repeated, his aims were good.  He would have been candid and un-selfconscious had that been possible for him; and perhaps the failure was one of manner rather than of heart.—­Yes, he was a fortunate man.

His most conspicuous success was as a play-writer.  In view of his essentially dramatic and historic temperament, it is surprising that he did not altogether devote himself to this branch of art; but all his dramas were produced between his thirty-third and his thirty-eighth years.  The first—­’La Duchesse de la Valliere’ was not to the public liking; but ‘The Lady of Lyons,’ written in two weeks, is in undiminished favor after near sixty years; and so are ‘Richelieu’ and ‘Money.’  There is no apparent reason why Bulwer should not have been as prolific a stage-author as Moliere or even Lope de Vega.  But we often value our best faculties least.