lead, but so exceedingly intelligent that you entirely forgive him. He has been, as a literary man, rather solitary and self-asserting-has never properly belonged to any clique or coterie-and seems to possess an austere and somewhat exclusive standard of taste.

It is to us, and must be to the Christian world, a delightful thought, to find such a man devoting the maturity of his mind to labours peculiarly professional; and every one who has the cause of religion at heart must wish him God speed in his present researches. Religion has in its abyss treasures yet unsounded and unsunned, though strong must be the hand, and true the eye, and retentive the breath, and daring yet reverent the spirit of their successful explorer-and such we believe to be qualities possessed by Dr Croly.

SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON.

PERHAPS the leading authors of the age may be divided into three classes. 1st, Those who have written avowedly and entirely for the few. 2dly, Those who have written principally for the many. And, 3dly, Those who have sought their audience in both classes, and have succeeded in forming, to some extent, at once an exoteric and an esoteric school of admirers. Of the first class, Coleridge and Wordsworth are the most distinguished specimens. Scott and Dickens stand at the head of the second; and Byron and Bulwer are facile principes of the third. Both these last named writers commenced their career by appealing to the sympathies of the multitude; but by and by, either satiated by their too easy success, or driven onward by the rapid and gigantic progress of their own

minds, they aimed at higher things, and sought, nor sought in vain, a more select audience. Byron's mind, in itself essentially unspeculative, was forced upwards upon those rugged and dangerous tracts of thought, where he has gathered the rarest of his beauties, by intimacy with Shelley, by envious emulation of his Lake contemporaries, and, above all, by the pale hand of his misery, unveiling to him heights and depths in his nature and genius, which were previously unknown and unsuspected, and beckoning him onward through their grim and shadowy regions. He grew, at once, and equally, in guilt, misery, and power. An intruder, too, on domains where some other thinkers had long fixed their calm and permanent dwelling, his appearance was the more startling. Here was a dandy discussing the great questions of natural and moral evil; a roué in silk stockings meditating suicide and mouthing blasphemy on an Alpine rock; a brilliant and popular wit and poet, setting Spinoza to music, and satirizing the principalities and powers of heaven, as bitterly as he had done the bards and reviewers of earth. Into those giddy and terrible heights where Milton had entered a permitted guest, in "privilege of virtue ;" where Goethe had walked in like a passionless and prying cherub, forgetting to worship in his absorbing desire to know; and on which Shelley was wrecked and stranded, in the storm of his fanatical unbelief; Byron is upborne by the presumption and the despair of his mental misery. Unable to see through the high walls which bound and beset our limited faculties and little life, he can at least dash his head against them. Hence, in "Manfred," " Cain," "Heaven and Earth," and "The Vision of Judgment," we have him calling upon the higher minds of his age to be as miserable as he was, just as he had in his first poems addressed the same sad message, less energetically, and less earnestly, to the community at large. And were it not unspeakably painful to contemplate a noble mind engaged in this profitless

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"apostleship of affliction," this thankless gospel of proclamation to men, that because they are miserable, it is their duty to become more so; that because they are bad, they are bound to be worse; we might be moved to laughter by its striking resemblance to the old story of the fox who had lost his tail.

In the career of Bulwer, we find a faint yet traceable resemblance to that of Byron. Like him, he began with wit, satire, and persiflage. Like him, he affected, for a season, a melodramatic earnestness. Like him, he was at last stung into genuine sincerity, and shot upwards into a higher sphere of thought and feeling. The three periods in Byron's history are distinctly marked by the three works, "English Bards," "Childe Harold," and "Cain." So "Pelham," "Eugene Aram," and "Zanoni," accurately mete out the stages in Bulwer's progress. Minor points of resemblance might be noted between the pair. Both sprung from the aristocracy; and one, at least, was prouder of what he deduced from Norman blood, than from nature. Bulwer, like Byron, is a distinguished dandy. Like him, too, he has been separated from his wife; like him, he is liberal in his politics. And while Byron, by way of doing penance, threw his jaded system into the Greek war, Bulwer has with better result leaped into a tub of cold water!

Point and brilliance are at once perceived to be the eading qualities of Bulwer's writing. His style is vicious from excess of virtue, weak from repletion of strength. Every word is a point, every clause a beauty, the close of every sentence a climax. He is as sedulous of his every stroke, as if the effect of the whole depended upon it. His pages are all sparkling with minute and insulated splendours; not suffused with a uniform and sober glow, nor shown in the reflected light of a few solitary and surpassing beauties. Some writers peril their reputation upon one long difficult leap, and, it accomplished, walk on at their leisure. With others, writing is a succession of hops, steps, and jumps.

This in general is productive of a feeling of tedium. It teases and fatigues the mind of the reader. It is like crying perpetually upon a hearer, who is attending with all his might, to attend more carefully. It at once wearies and provokes, insults the reader, and betrays a certain weakness on the part of the author. If in Bulwer's writings we weary less than in others, it is owing to the artistic skill with which he intermingles his points of humour with those of sententious reflection or vivid narrative. All is point: but the point perpetually varies "from gay to grave, from lively to severe ;" including in it raillery and reasoning, light dialogue and earnest discussion, bursts of political feeling and raptures of poetical description; here a sarcasm, almost worthy of Voltaire, and there a passage of pensive grandeur, which Rousseau might have written in his tears. To keep up this perpetual play of varied excellence, required at once great vigour and great versatility of talents: for Bulwer never walks through his part, never proses, is never tame, and seldom indeed substitutes sound for sense, or mere flummery for force and fire. He generally writes his best; and our great quarrel, indeed, with him is, that he is too uniformly erect in the stirrups, too conscious of himself, of his exquisite management, of his complete equipment, of the speed with which he devours the dust; and seldom exhibits the careless grandeur of one who is riding at the pace of the whirlwind, with perfect self-oblivion, and with perfect security.

Bulwer reminds us less of an Englishman Frenchified, than of a Frenchman partially Anglicized. The original powers and tendencies of his mind, his eloquence, wit, sentiments, and feelings, his talents and his opinions, his taste and style, are those of a modern Frenchman. But these, long subjected to English influences, and long trained to be candidates for an English popularity, have been modified and altered from their native bent. In all his writings, however, you breathe a foreign atmosphere, and

find very slight sympathy with the habits, manners, or tastes of his native country. Not Zanoni alone, of his heroes, is cut off from country, as by a chasm, or if held to it, held only by ties, which might with equal strength bind him to other planets; all his leading characters, whatever their own pretensions, or whatever their creator may assert of them, are in reality citizens of the world, and have no more genuine relation to the land whence they spring, than have the winds, which linger not over its loveliest landscapes, and hurry past its most endeared and consecrated spots. Eugene Aram is not an Englishman; Rienzi is hardly an Italian. Bulwer is perhaps the first instance of a great novelist obtaining popularity without a particle of nationality in his spirit, or in his writings. We do not question his attachment to his own principles or his native country; but of that tide of national prejudice which, Burns says, "shall boil on in his breast till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest," he betrays not one drop. His novels might all have appeared as translations from a foreign language, and have lost but little of their interest or verisimilitude. This is the more remarkable, as his reign exactly divides the space between that of two others, who have obtained boundless fame, greatly in consequence of the very quality, in varied forms, which Bulwer lacks. Scott's knowledge and love of Scotland, Dickens' knowledge and love of London, stand in curious antithesis to Bulwer's intense cosmopolitanism and ideal indifference.

Akin to this, and connected either as cause or as effect with it, is a certain dignified independence of thought and feeling, inseparable from the motion of Bulwer's mind. He is not a great original thinker; on no one subject can he be called profound, but on all, he thinks and speaks for himself. He belongs to no school either in literature or in politics, and he has created no school. He is too proud for a Radical, and too wide-minded for a Tory. He is too