Page:Edward Lytton Bulwer.pdf/11

Rh reader is very unquiet about the success of Pelham's suit: we think the very coldest must be touched by Devereux's generous and devoted attachment to the beautiful and desolate Spanish girl. Love was never more passionate in Byron, more true in Shakspeare, more lovely in nature, than it is here "gently bodied forth." We have hitherto dwelt on other merits than the rich passionate colours given by the heart. But the whole history of Isora is touched by that poetical spirit, which does not, it is true, make nature more beautiful than nature often is, but shows that beauty in its fairest light, the light of imagination. There is, to us, something inexpressibly touching in Devereux's abiding affection, when, to quote an exquisite passage from the "Milton" in after-years, "her memory made the moonlight of his mind," and "Her thoughts stole o'er like a spirit's lay? Singing the darkness of his fate away." One great peculiarity in Mr. Bulwer's writings is, the singular originality of his minor characters: they are not merely "two or three puppets to fill up the scene," whose only distinguishing mark is a name, but each is some embodied thought, and distinguished by some natural touch: in short, people in his books are as different as they are in real life. Mr. Bulwer combines, to a rare degree, the power of creation with the faculty of observation; and it is this union which gives such infinite variety to "his storied page of human life."* "Paul Clifford" came next; as different to its brethren as if they had not had "one common father." "Paul Clifford" is at once a political satire, a romance of middle life; a practical and moral treatise, put forth in the popular form of a novel. The satire is levelled at existing persons and abuses—the romance is the poetry which passion and feeling extract from the daily events of common life—the moral is that drawn from the temptation which leads, and the punishment which follows, the crimes we know to be hourly committed. For the first time, Mr. Bulwer seems to have felt what an engine of power was the novel for present utility; how forcibly it could be brought to play on the vice whose result is misery—the indolence whose result is injury, and the selfishness which is at once its own best and worst punishment. What leading-article in a review ever brought forward the evil influence of laws, that punish rather than guard, upon the lower classes, with such energy and truth as the dramatic exposition of their hardship and insufficiency in "Paul Clifford?" It is a great and noble distinction for an author (and we know no other modern novelist that can "lay the flattering unction to his soul") to be able to say, "I have written in the hope of