by touches--in fact by _douches_--of Sternian fantastry, and by other
touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even his
handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of
his, was not wholly _de ban aloi_. To pronounce him, as was once done by
an acute and amiable judge, "the _hum_miest of _bugs_" was excessive in
life, and would be preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly
was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang
"faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the
composition is _pastiche_; a dozen other metaphors--of stucco, veneer,
glueing-up--suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn,
a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of
work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment,
symptom, and pattern at once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing
Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the
very greatest.

It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism to
Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than ungrateful or more
ungrateful than uncritical. Because he has amused the boy, it seems to
be taken for granted that he ought not to amuse the man: because he does
not write with the artificial and often extremely arbitrary graces of
the composition books, that he is "not literature." If it be so, why in
the first case so much the worse for "the man," and in the second so
much the worse for literature. As a matter of fact, he has many of the
qualities of the novelist in a high degree: and if he were in the
fortunate position of an ancient classic, whose best works only survive,
these qualities could not fail of recognition. Much of his later work
simply ought not to count; for it was mere hack-labour, rendered, if not
necessary, very nearly so by the sailor's habit (which Marryat possessed
in the highest degree) of getting rid of money. Even among this,