Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/137

Rh L Y T L Y T 121 gave way ; and he died at Nice on the 20th November, 1847. Lyte s first work was Tales in Verse illustrative of several of the, Petitions in the Lord s Prayer, which was completed during a period of rest at Lymington, but was not published till the year 1826 ; it drew a word of warm commendation from a competent critic in the Nodes Ambrosianse. He next published a volume of Poems, chiefly Religious, in 1833, and in the following year a little collection of psalms and hymns entitled The Spirit of the Psalms. These pro ductions were drawn from various sources, but many were his own ; and the idea of the book was to express, in language specially accordant with Christian experience, the leading thoughts contained in the Psalter. Probably one of the best productions of Lyte s pen was a finely appreciative memoir of Henry Vaughan, the &quot;Silurist/ which he prefixed to an edition of his works. After his death, a volume of Remains with a memoir was published, and the poems contained in this, with those in Poems, chiefly Religious, were after wards issued in one volume. In the region of pure poetry Lyte cannot be said to have taken any special rank ; refinement and pathos, rather than great imaginative power, were the chief marks of his work. As a divine he was evangelical in doctrine, but his ecclesiastical sympathies were with the Oxford school ; as a preacher he was simple, earnest, and graceful in style ; but his chief claim to remembrance lies in the beauty and spiritual elevation of his hymns, some of which may be said to have become classical. The best known are &quot;Abide with me! fast falls the eventide&quot;; &quot;Jesus, I my cross have taken&quot;; &quot;Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven&quot;; and &quot; Pleasant are thy courts above.&quot; LYTTELTON, GEORGE, LORD (1709-1773), statesman and man of letters, born at Hagley, Worcestershire, in 1709, was a descendant of the great THOMAS DE LITTLETON (7.0.), and the eldest son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, Bart., who at the Revolution of 1688 and during the following reign was one of the ablest Whig debaters of the House of Commons. Lyttelton was educated at Eton and Oxford, and in 1728 set out on the grand tour, spending consider able periods at Paris and Rome. On his return to England he sat for Okehampton, Devonshire, beginning public life in the same year with Pitt; and from 1744 to 1754 he held the office of a lord commissioner of the treasury. In 1755 he succeeded Legge as chancellor of the exchequer, but in the following year he quitted office, on which oc casion he was raised to the peerage as Lord Lyttelton, baron of Frankley, in the county of Worcester. In the political crisis of 1765, before the formation of the llock- ingham administration, it was at one time suggested that he might be placed at the head of the treasury, but he firmly declined to take part in any such scheme. The closing years of his life were devoted chiefly to literary pursuits. He died on August 22, 1773. Lyttelton s earliest publication (1735), Letters from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan, appeared anonymously. Much greater celebrity was achieved by his Observations on the Conversion and Apostlesliip of St Paul, also anonymous, published in 1747. It takes the form of a letter to Gilbert West, and is designed to show that St Paul s conversion is of itself a sufficient demonstration of the divine character of Christianity. The drift of the argument is that it is equally inconceivable that the apostle could have been the victim or the originator of a cheat, and that therefore he must have been divinely inspired. It is interesting to know that Dr Johnson regarded the work as one &quot;to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer.&quot; Lord Lyttelton s Dialogues of the Dead, a creditable performance, though hardly rivalling either Luciaii or Landor, appeared in 1760. His History of Henry II. (1764-67), the fruit of twenty years labour, is not now cited as an authority, but is painstaking and fair. Lyttelton was also a writer of verse ; his Monody on his wife s death has been praised by Gray for its elegiac tenderness, and his Prologue to the Coriolanus of his friend Thomson shows genuine feeling. He was also the author of the well-known stanza in the Castle of Indolence, in which the poet himself is described. A complete col lection of the Works of Lord Lyttelton was published after his death by his nephew, G. E. Ayscough. See Memoirs and Corre spondence of Lord Lyttelton, 1734-1773 (2 vols., 1845). LYTTOX, EDWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER LYTTON, BARON (1805-1873), novelist, dramatist, poet, politician, miscellaneous essayist, the most versatile writer and one of the most active and widely discursive theorizers of his generation, was born in May 1805, the youngest of the three sons of General Bulwer, of Heydon Hall and Wood Bailing, Norfolk. He was a few months younger than Benjamin Disraeli ; the two lives acted not a little one on the other, and offer many curious points of like ness and contrast. Bulwer s father died when he was two years old ; the care of the boy devolved on his mother, one of the Lyttons of Knebworth, Hertfordshire, whose name he afterwards assumed. To this devoted and accomplished mother he always expressed the warmest gratitude for his early training. He was not sent to a public school ; he was educated privately. In his novels and essays he often discusses the advantages and disadvantages of public schools. One thing is tolerably certain that if he had been sent to a public school he would not have published at the age of fifteen a volume of poems (Ismael, an Oriental Tale, uith other Poems, 1820). Generous sentiment and eager love of fame are more conspicuous in these juvenile procluctions- than metrical faculty. One of the poems dwells warmly on the ancient glories of the house of Lytton ; the volume as a whole is dedicated to &quot;the British public that generous public who have always been the fosterers of industry or genius, who have always looked forward from the imperfections of youth to the fruits of maturity.&quot; The youthful poet criticizes Byron from the point of view of a respectable household ; but, though he seems to have been, taught to make Pope, *C ray, and Collins his models, the Byronic influence is very apparent both in phrase and hi sentiment. In the local colouring of the &quot; Oriental Tale &quot;&quot; he gives promise, afterwards amply fulfilled, of painstaking study of his materials; and &quot; Geraldine, or the Fatal Boon,&quot; gives a good foretaste of his fertility in the invention of romantic incident. At Cambridge, in 1825, Bulwer won the chancellor s medal with a poem, on &quot;Sculpture.&quot; In 182G he printed for private circulation Weeds and Wild Flowers. In 1827 he published O Neill, or the Rtbel, a romance, in heroic couplets, of patriotic struggle in Ireland, dedicated to Lady Blessington. These juvenilia, and also a metrical satire,. The Siamese Tivins, issued in 1831, he afterwards ignored, describing The New Timon as his first publication in verse, with the exception of his dramas and translations from Schiller. Bulwer s first romance, Falkland, published anonymously in 1827, was in the vein of fantastic German romance popular at the beginning of the century, and did not bring him the fame that he coveted so ardently. It was other wise with Pelham, published in the following year. In this he went with the native stream of fiction, and at once- made himself felt as a power. For two or three years before he wrote Pelham, the books of the season had been novels of remarkable freshness and brilliancy dealing with* fashionable life Plumer Ward s now forgotten but then nmch-talked-of Tremaine, Theodore Hook s Sayings andJ Doings, Lister s Granly, Disraeli s Vivian Grey. With these brilliant celebrities Bulwer, always a chivalrous emulator of whatever was famous, entered into direct com petition, and at once became at least their equal in popular favour. If we compare this his first novel with any of his last productions, he strikes us as having attained at abound to the full measure of his powers. That he wrote Pelham at twenty-two is a much more remarkable fact than that he wrote ballads at five. The plot is not perhaps so closely woven together as in The Parisians, but the variety of character introduced from high life, low life, and middle life is quite as great. He had evidently been fascinated by Wilhelm Meister, and the central purpose of his story is to run the hero through an apprenticeship like Wilhelm s.- All kinds of human beings and all their works are interest ing to Pelham, the man of fashion, the bustling statesman, XV. 16