Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 34.djvu/393

 Edinburgh,’ 1854. 47. ‘What will he do with it?’ 1858 (originally in ‘Blackwood’). 48. ‘St. Stephen's’ (poem), 1860. 49. ‘A Strange Story,’ 1862 (originally in ‘All the Year Round’). 50. ‘Caxtoniana’ (essays), 1863. 51. ‘The Boatman; by Pisistratus Caxton’ (a poem reprinted from ‘Blackwood’), 1864. 52. ‘The Lost Tales of Miletus’ (poems), 1866. 53. ‘Walpole, or Every Man has his Price’ (rhymed comedy), 1869. 54. ‘The Odes and Epodes of Horace,’ (translation), 1869. 55. ‘The Coming Race,’ 1871 (originally in ‘Blackwood’). 56. ‘Kenelm Chillingly,’ 1873. 57. ‘The Parisians,’ 1873 (originally in ‘Blackwood’). 58. ‘Speeches and other Political Writings,’ with prefatory memoir by his son, 1874. 59. ‘Pausanias the Spartan,’ an unfinished historical romance, edited by his son, 1876. A collective edition of his novels first appeared in 1840; a cheap edition, as above, was published by Routledge in 1853, &c., and a library edition in 43 vols. by Blackwood (1859–63). Dramatic works, with the ‘Odes,’ were published in 1841. Poetical and dramatic works in 5 vols. appeared in 1852–4. There are numerous translations of separate novels, and several have been dramatised.

 LYTTON, EDWARD ROBERT BULWER, first (1831–1891), statesman and poet, only son of the first Baron Lytton [q. v.], was born in London 8 Nov. 1831. He was educated for a short time at Harrow, and afterwards privately and at Bonn, where he especially applied himself to modern languages. His first verses, written at the age of twelve, and hitherto unpublished, show that he even then possessed a great command of literary expression, and in their gay banter and half-serious sentiment are as unlike as possible to the ordinary productions of even a clever boy. Most of his first published volume was also composed before 1849, when he went to Washington as private secretary to his uncle, Lord Dalling [see ]. He accompanied him on his removal to Florence, and was subsequently paid attaché at the Hague and Vienna, spending sufficient time in London to mix in literary circles and contract warm friendships with Dickens and Forster. His first book, ‘Clytemnestra, The Earl's Return, and other Poems,’ had meanwhile appeared in 1855, under the pseudonym of ‘Owen Meredith,’ adopted from two christian names of early use in his family, and had been followed in 1857 by ‘The Wanderer,’ a volume of lyrical poems. Both attracted very considerable attention from their extraordinary fluency and command of poetic diction, combined with vivid description and strokes of genuine imagination. The form, however, was too imitative. Browning has never been reproduced so well, but reproduction it is. Some pieces in ‘The Wanderer,’ nevertheless, showed independence of models. ‘King Solomon and the Mouse’ and ‘The Portrait,’ in particular, are admirable narratives, simple, straightforward, and impressive.

Lytton's attachéship at Vienna was diversified by missions to Belgrade, where he acted as consul-general during a period of much disturbance, and wrote valuable commercial reports. In 1862 he became second secretary at Vienna; in 1863 he was made secretary of legation at Copenhagen at the time of the Princess of Wales's marriage; in 1864 he was transferred to Athens, and in 1865 to Lisbon. At all these courts he frequently acted as chargé d'affaires, and at Lisbon he negotiated a commercial treaty. He had (4 Oct. 1864) married Edith, second daughter of the Hon. Edward Villiers and niece of the Earl of Clarendon.

His literary reputation had meanwhile been much extended by the publication (1860) of ‘Lucile,’ a poem which he afterwards described as ‘representing the result of an experiment so alien to my present appreciation of the nature and conditions of verse that I could have wished to withdraw it from print.’ The experiment, however, was worth making. It proved that the English language was equal to the substantial reproduction, in rhyming anapæstic couplets, of a French novel, and though some of the incidents and some of the diction are avowedly borrowed from George Sand's ‘Lavinia,’ the characters are quite different, and the poet's own individuality is more distinctly apparent than in any of his former or in several of his subsequent writings. ‘Tannhäuser,’ for instance (1861), written in conjunction with his friend Julian Fane, and published under the pseudonym of Neville Temple and Edward Trevor, is a pallid