supported his country's cause against odds, and at the cost of his own popularity, he feels justified in anticipating a cordial reception. What then must be his feelings on finding himself actually given the cold shoulder by those he had defended, on the plea that his defence was impolitic and discourteous? In such circumstances there is one course which no wise man will pursue, and that is to treat his aspersers with anything else. than silent disdain. Cooper was far from being thus wise: he lectured his fellow-citizens with quite as much asperity as he had erewhile lectured the tyrants of the Old World; with as much justice too, and with an effect even more embroiling. In "A Letter to his Countrymen," "Monikins," "Homeward Bound," and "Home as Found," he admonished and satirized them with characteristic vigor. The last-named of these books brings us to the year 1838, and of Cooper's life the fiftieth. He seemed in a fair way to become a universal Ishmael. Yet once more he had only begun to fight. In 1838 he commenced action against a New York newspaper for slander, and for five years thereafter the courts of his country resounded with the cries and thwackings of the combatants. But Cooper could

66

find no adversary really worthy of his steel, and in 1843 he was able to write to a friend, "I have beaten every man I have sued who has not retracted his libels!" He had beaten them fairly, and one fancies that even he must at last have become weary of his favorite passion of proving himself in the right. Howbeit, peace was declared over the corpse of the last of his opponents, and the victor in so many fields could now apply himself undisturbedly to the vocations from which war had partially distracted him, only partially, for in 1840, in the heat of the newspaper fray, he astonished the public by producing one of the loveliest of his romances and perhaps the very best of the Leatherstocking series, "The Pathfinder." William Cullen Bryant holds this to be "a glorious work," and speaks of its moral beauty, the vividness and force of its delineations, and the unspoiled love of nature and fresh and warm emotions which give life to the narrative and dialogue. Yet Cooper was at that time over fifty years of age.

Nevertheless, so far as his abilities both mental and physical were concerned, the mighty man was still in the prime of his manhood, if not of his youth. During the seven or eight years yet to elapse, after the close of his slander suits in 1843, before his unexpected death in 1851, he wrote not less than

twelve new novels, several of them touching the high-water mark of his genius. Of them may be specially mentioned "Two Admirals" and "Wing-and-Wing," "Wyandotte," and "Jack Tier." Besides all this long list of his works, he published "Sketches of Switzerland" in 1836; "Gleanings in Europe," in a series of eight volumes, beginning 1837; a "Naval History of the United States," in two octavo volumes; and wrote three or four other books which seem to have remained in manuscript. Altogether it was a gigantic life-work, worthy of the giant who achieved it.

Cooper was hated as well as loved during his lifetime, but at his death the love had quenched the hate, and there are none but lovers of him now. He was manly, sincere, sensitive, independent; rough without but sweet within. He sought the good of others, he devoutly believed in God, and if he was always ready to take his own part in a fight, he never forgot his own self-respect or forfeited other men's. But above all he was a great novelist, original and irresistible. America has produced no other man built on a scale so continental

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON.

THE patrician in literature is always 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. 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.

An aristocrat of aristocrats undoubtedly he was, though it concerns us not to determine whether the blood of Plantagenet kings and Norman conquerors really flowed in his veins. both father's and mother's side he was thoroughly well connected. Heydon Hall in Norfolk was the hereditary home of the Norman Bulwers; the Saxon Lyttons had since the Conquest lived at Knebworth in Derbyshire. 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 purple-velvet 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 haystack. 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.

VOL. XI. — - 12

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. No one cares to know what a man thinks of his own actions. No one is interested to learn that Bulwer meant "Paul Clifford" to be an edifying work, or that he married his wife from the highest motives. We do not take him so seriously: we are satisfied that he wrote the story first and discovered its morality afterwards; and that lofty motives would not have united him to Miss Rosina Doyle Wheeler had she not been pretty and clever. 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 a 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 eveningdress; 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.

The main activities of his life and from start to finish his energy was great - were in politics and in literature. His political career covers about forty years, from the time he took his degree at Cambridge till Lord Derby made him a peer in

1866. He accomplished nothing of serious importance, but his course was always creditable: he began as a sentimental Radical and ended as a liberal Conservative; he advocated the Crimean War; the Corn Laws found him in a compromising humor; his record as Colonial Secretary offers nothing memorable in statesmanship. The extraordinary brilliancy of his brother Henry's diplomatic life throws Edward's achievements into the shade. There is nothing to be ashamed of, but had he done nothing. else he would have been unknown. But 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 mind accepts the report as genuine, but our ear affirms an unreality; this is reproduction, indeed, but not creation. Bulwer himself, when his fit is past, and his critical faculty re-awakens, probably knows as well. as another that these labored and meritorious pages of his are not graven on the eternal adamant. But they are the best he can do, and perhaps there is none better of their kind. They have a right to be; for while genius may do harm as well as good, Bulwer never does harm, and in spite of sickly sentiment and sham philosophy, is uniformly instructive, amusing, and edifying.

"To love her," wrote Dick Steele of a certain great dame, "is a liberal education;" and we might also say the same of the reading of Bulwer's romances. He was learned, and he put