he made marks deep and early. When the purely domestic kind came in he
made them, earlier and deeper still, with _The Caxtons_ (1850), _My
Novel_ (1853), etc. He caught the "sensation" ball at nearly its first
service with his old "mystery" racket, and played the most brilliant
game of the whole tournament in _A Strange Story_ (1862). At the last he
tried later kinds still in books like _The Coming Race_ (1871), _The
Parisians_ (1873), and _Kenelm Chillingly_. And once, Pallas being kind,
he did an almost perfect thing (there is not a speck or a flaw in it
except, perhaps, the mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one
of the best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction
known to the world, in the ghost-story of _The Haunted and the Haunters_
(1859).

Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many
merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department.
And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have
accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That
this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes
positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish,
half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is
probably true. But it is not all the truth: if it were, it would be
almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults
completely, the second almost completely; and that from _The Caxtons_
(1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary character in
any such respect. But other faults--or at least defects--remain. They
may be almost summed up in the charge of want of _consummateness_.
Bulwer could be romantic--but his romance had the touch of bad taste and
insincerity referred to above. He could, as in _The Caxtons_, be fairly
true to ordinary life--but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of
setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity