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The Life of Lord Metcalfe.

seat in the House of Lords had been abandoned. Garter King-of-Arms sends him the prescribed formula of the ceremony; - court robe-makers solicit his lordship's patronage;-the doors of Parliament are thrown wide open to him—a little too late!

At the Oriental Club in Hanover Square are gathered together all the men of any note connected with the government of India. He is not forgotten by them amongst whom he had first and longest laboured; and an address penetrates into his sick chamber, signed by governors-general and governors of every department. "The parchment on which their names are inscribed could scarcely be spread out in his room, when it was presented by Lord Auckland." The dying man burst into tears. "It is easy," he said, "to bear up against ill-usage, but such kindness as this quite overpowers me."

Surely no man ever displayed a more admirable union of fortitude, of firmness, of decision, with tenderness of heart and constant gentleness of disposition. It is with pleasure we find that so amiable a man was not left, during this painful period of his life, without the care and affection of a female friend. The last thing we hear is the sound of a sister's harp soothing his anguish, or rendering him oblivious of it for a time. The last thing we see is the kindly patient tottering from his chair, to put the cover on his sister's harp when she had ceased playing on it.

Lord Metcalfe, first and last of the title, died 5th September 1846. He was interred in a quite private and unostentatious manner in the family

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vault in the little parish church of Winkfield, near Fern Hill. He had often expressed a wish that this should be his last resting-place. epitaph written by Mr Macaulay, who a marble tablet in this church is an India. It is somewhat long for an knew him and had served with him in epitaph, but it is brief and compendious as a summary of his history and his character. It is far better than Let us any we could present to the reader. abridged and necessarily imperfect therefore close our own account of this excellent man by extracting it.

"Near this stone is laid CHARLES THEOPHILUS, first and last LORD METposts and difficult conjunctures, and CALFE, a Statesman tried in many high found equal to all. The Three Greatest Dependencies of the British Crown were successively intrusted to his care. In bity, and his moderation are held in India his fortitude, his wisdom, his prohonourable remembrance by men of many maica, still convulsed by a social revoluraces, languages, and religions. In Jalong suffering had engendered in one tion, he calmed the evil passions which In Canada, not yet recovered from the class and long domination in another. contending factions to each other and to calamities of civil war, he reconciled the mother country.

his public virtue, but those only who en"Public esteem was the just reward of joyed the privilege of his friendship could appreciate the whole worth of his gentle and noble nature. Costly monuments in Asiatic and American cities attest the gratitude of nations which he ruled; this tablet records the sorrow and the pride Private Affection." with which his memory is cherished by

BULWER.

EVERY age has its own recognised and authoritative mode of dispensing fame. When genius has stolen its way noiselessly, or with the shouts and exultation of a triumphal progress, as the case may happen, to that height of undisputed eminence, on the way to which so many falter, and stumble, and die, it is time for the approbation of the great spectator Public to take a distinct and definite form. We do not, in these days, crown the poet's bust with laurels, or make him a public ovation. We no longer confer upon him court appointments, or offices of state. He is a singer, a maker, a hierophant of the universal mysteries, but it is by no means certain that he is the better qualified on that account for the duties of a royal lackey, or the loftier necessities of a legislator. We cannot count it other than a specious fallacy, that the man who is inspired for song, or gifted for story, should be accepted in right of this one power which he has above his fellows, as the man most able to rule and govern a world of men. It may be very well for Mr Carlyle to rave of Burns as the *one Titan in his mean century. Burns, poor glorious waif, who had no dominion in that lost empire, that world of unrule and rebellion, himself-had, happily, only songs, and not laws, to make for mankind, as the great Providence of heaven appointed it; and though we cannot sufficiently resent that contempt under the guise of honour, that wilful mis-appreciation and lese majesty, which would make genius the pensioner of wealth and rank, and fills the world with clamour, when the splendid beggar receives only a commission for "gauging auld beerbarrels" at the hand of power, we have an equally small esteem for the overweening estimation, which imagines the writer to be necessarily possessed of the latent might of government, an appanage and addition by the way to his more distinguished gift. If Burns were but a century or two further back, we could imagine a fine allegory in his excisemanshipa bitter, but most needful and telling lesson to all who should come after

him. Here was a man whom God himself had gifted with one of the grandest gifts of heaven-the only man in his century fit to make laws and govern men, says Mr Carlyle; but at all events, in sober truth a wonderfulman, reaching far above his fellows, with higher pleasures and higher achievements within his reach than any that they could aspire to; yet this man must build his hopes upon a piece of patronage-must wait to see what will be done for him! What was done for him was a just answer to the fatal and foolish theory which makes the poet a mendicant. He was abler to be a poet than any one else in the three kingdoms; but he was not abler to be a minister of state, or even an exciseman; and the man so greatly gifted, who could not, or would not, conquer fortune for himself, received justly that dole of public charity, the record of which remains to us a bitter and a deserved satire upon the socalled claims of genius. Had Burns been made a privy-councillor, the Burnses of future generations, and many a deluded pretender who was no Burns, might have been bound for ever to this fatal mendicancy, this waiting for something to be done for them. But Burns was only made an exciseman; and worldly power, wiser in its generation than poets and their patrons, recorded thus for ever its contempt of the unseemly petition, and taught the world, by an example, what alms it thought meet to bestow upon one whose princely endowments reached to fortunes greater than it had at its disposal, and what luck the poet is like to have, when it pleases the poet to go a-begging, instead of working out his own fate and fortune like a common man.

We are not speaking of Burns, however, nor of that lamentable apotheosis of his ruin, nor of the claims of genius in general and the most adequate way of recognising them; but rather of the present form in which public approval is (without entering into the question of should-be) made known to the literary favourites of the public. Her Majesty does not call

them to her counsels, as our French neighbours did; nor confer embassies and consulships upon them, as our American cousins do. There is not even an order of merit, a ribbon or a cross, to mark out to public regard the man whom multitudes would delight to honour; but nevertheless these multitudes make a voice for themselves. When the favourite is sufficiently established in their regard, the crowd rushes, million-strong, against the stout barricade of copyright, and forthwith Fame, seated on the summit thereof, casts down a shower of volumes, green, and buff, and manytinted, upon their heads; and in the glories of a People's Edition the author straightway becomes a classic, and takes his recognised seat upon the literary Olympus, one of the deities of the same.

Yes, though Mr Harrison Ainsworth shares his glories though there are no green books so plentiful at railway stations as the multitudinous green books of Mr G. P. R. James-there can still be no doubt that the great public acknowledgment which we make in these days of an author's claims to the popular suffrage, is in this fact of a cheap edition of his works. It is the lasting encore to the poet's singing-the permanent call before the curtain of the great playwright-the seal of a popular reputation.

For our own part, we do not pretend to admire cheap editions. They are great things for the lovers of reading, who may chance to have a voracious appetite and a light purse; but they are very poor things for the lovers of books. We are content to wait a year or two for our set of the Waverley Novels-those household friends and kindly visitors, and to spend the price of it in a circulating library subscription, rather than buy the cheap edition of those cherished and familiar acquaintances. Not withstanding, when it came to the public ear that the novels of Sir E. B. Lytton had been purchased at a fabulous price for a cheap reprint, there can be little doubt that this great test of the great writer's popularity gave, in almost every mind, a certain stability and permanence to his fame.

Fame is not gained in a day. Before you were born, young reader, who are still in the Maltravers period, and have a romantic admiration for those tall, gloomy, handsome, unfortunate heroes and poets, this reputation-versatile, yet consistent-manysided, but always individual, began to be. It has known its ebb and its flow, its decadence and revival, like everything else that is human. The public, who know very well, as Sir E. B. Lytton knows, that the great event of falling in love, however frequently repeated, is not enough to fill up the natural measure of a life, had even begun, if it must be confessed, to weary of Bulwer; when suddenly spring came to the languid genius, which was not made to sigh away its being upon the false ideals which please the young. The Caxtons, with its healthy English daylight, put out the lingering taper of the Zanonis, and the failing reputation burst into a blaze to decline no more.

And we would clearly premise, before we go further, that it is not to Bulwer the author of some score of tales, but to Bulwer the author of Pelham, The Caxtons, and My Novel, that we assign the highest place among modern writers of fiction. There is always power in the creations of his fancy; he is always polished, witty, learned; but his host of miscellaneous works do not raise him so much above the surrounding crowd as to call for a special distinction. In these three books, his first and his latest efforts, he alone raises himself to his full height of stature. His acquaintance with the lower groundwork of society does not at any time reach the kindly and familiar knowledge of Dickens; and his expositions of the lordly world of rank and riches, in which he is perhaps more at home, are not distinguished by the keen and poignant insight which belongs to Thackeray; yet his books are more perfect productions than either of these his contemporaries have yet to boast of, and he is himself a larger spirit, a more complete and perfect man. Touches of pathos, which he never reaches, and flashes of bright humour, equally foreign to his pages, are in other writers of the day; yet we do not falter in our judgment, that Bulwer is

the greatest of modern artists in the sphere he has chosen-the first novelist of his time. We will never, indeed, say Sir Edward, as we say Sir Walter -we cannot take the man of fashion, the lofty sentimentalist, the profound thinker, into our heart with the affectionate appropriation wherewith we cling to the greatest of all fictionists, past or present, our own kind fatherlike Magician, the most real, the most human of historians. No one invades the supreme unenvied place of Scott; but in this generation, which has quickened its pace so mightily in its own self-complacent opinion, since the days of Scott were ended, there is, in our apprehension, no pinnacle so high as that on which we hang our wreath to Bulwer-like the Roman emperor, a prince among his equals, the first of his craft.

Before proceeding to discuss the merits on which we ground our preference, let us glance aside a moment upon two other authors of eminence, who have received, like Bulwer, within a very short time, the honours of a People's Edition. Novelists by the mere necessity of nature, and love of the art, the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the present learned Recorder of Hull, can never be supposed to be. To neither of these distinguished writers is their story the principal object, and this deprives them necessarily of many of the easy and unconscious graces into which the man who tells his tale out of pure love for telling it, falls unawares. On the other hand, however, the Purpose, whose greater form is always visible behind the Story, gives a loftiness and weight to their productions; and while we set ourselves to make acquaintance with men in the pages of other novelists of equal standing, and have our eyes directed to those more delicate touches of perception and insight which qualify the author for his work, it is the flashing meteors of political opinion, the discussions of policy, the crafts of state, for which we look in the works of Disraeli; while in Mr Warren's serious histories we prepare ourselves to trace the hand of Providence working out their frightful doom upon vice and falsehood, but in due time vindicating and always sustaining the pure

and true. Mr Disraeli is no less a political writer for the scanty love-story which winds its silken thread through his pages. We do not think of accepting such a visionary personage as Sybil, or even the more real and human proportions of Coningsby, as representatives of the men and women of the time; but, without hesitation, we accept Tadpole and Taper, true impersonations of a class, which class, henceforward, are known as Tapers and Tadpoles, and by no other name. Nor can we think of mere heroes and heroines in either the first or the latest work of Mr Warren. In the terrible histories of his Diary of a Late Physician, we are overwhelmed by the constant presence of some great invisible power, which strides upon the criminal with the relentless steps of Fate; and we can feel the mad impatience of the slowly dying sinner, and the majestic calm of Providential retribution, which will neither be hastened nor retarded by all the chafings of humanity. The same principle, but the brighter side of it, makes the whole argument of Now and Then, where we feel again that we have less to do with the actors in the story than with the great unseen Dispenser of Events; and the book is not so much warm with the comings and goings of common men and women, as solemn with the stately steps of Providence, confounding guilt and establishing innocence, but only "in its own time." It is true that we owe to Mr Disraeli scenes of lighter and kindlier animation, with many a fine outburst of enthusiasm, and some admirable portraits; and to Mr Warren one well-compacted novel, and such a vivid picture of one phase of life, that we cannot enter at the glass doors of a fashionable shop, without finding ourselves accosted by the bland tones of Mr Huckaback, or "served" by the agile attentions of Mr Titmouse: but not the less do these gentlemen hold their distinct place among, and yet separate from, the writers of novels. The one, selfcontained and passionless, is always in the tribune; the other, with a keen and serious eye, surveys the mystic crossings of the threads of fate-traces them one by one through the entanglement, and "justifies the ways of God

to man." Perhaps a better type of the political novelist could scarcely be found, take him all in all, than Mr Disraeli; and Mr Warren is our moralist.

Neither politician nor moralist, yet something of both-neither a weeping philosopher nor a mocking satirist, yet skilled in all the weapons of wit and wisdom, is the great writer whose name stands at the head of our page. That he is a man of lively and universal ambition, or, rather, that his conscious powers cannot endure to be foiled by anything, we may discern by a glance at the present list of Messrs Routledge, at the past lists of Messrs Colburn and Bentley. An old advertisement of novels is a curiosity; it is only twenty years ago, yet here are sundry files of books, arranged in the properest order, each with its little quotation, the praise of some kind critic, each-it is a humiliating truth-as dead as the Pharaohs, as much forgotten and out of mind as the builder of the Pyramids. Among these defunct volumes are sprinkled, with no sparing hand, the productions of our author; and descending from that period to this, we can trace him from vein to vein, and from age to age; from the revels of the gay Pompeians to the feats of the romantic highwaymen from the table of Bolingbroke to the feast of Harold-from the Byronic twilight of sentimentalism to the lightsome day of My Novel. Turn another page, and the same hand, weary of perpetual conquest, has tried another field, and is already a successful dramatist, and a writer of terse and powerful verse. This is surely a wide enough basis to build reputation upon; and when it is added that Sir E. B. Lytton, when it pleases him, can speak as well as write, it may be fairly acknowledged that this restless intellect, this prompt and curious mind which is not content to leave any pursuit untried, has followed, with a worthy enthusiasm, almost all the peaceful pathways that lead to fame.

It is considerably more than twenty years since, in Pelham, the young author made his debut, with a brilliance which we in those days look back upon with envy. A first appearance is not nearly so much an event

now as then, for novel-writing was much less a common amusement twenty years ago, and the public had greater leisure to be interested. But he who would read Pelham to-day, does not get it in the musty volumes of its primitive issue: it is now one of those perennial books which are always renewing themselves, and you can choose your edition. To say what Pelham is, may look somewhat unnecessary at this time: how a young, inexperienced, and unmatured intellect could have produced it, is its great wonder, and that it is worthy of the Bulwer of to-day is its great praise. The grace and lightness with which the superficial character of Pelham is sustained, and the skill with which his deeper and true character unfolds and expands under this crust, show us at once the easy and graceful power, which does not require to rack or distort its faculties for a great achievement. Strangely enough, there are still matter-of-fact, good people, who complain that our hero is a coxcomb, and cannot see how nicely assumed is this mantle of superb foppery, nor how smilingly and good. humouredly aware of it is its wearer himself. From the easy tone of the beginning, the quiet and amusing narrative of those conventional falsities in the midst of which Pelham was born, the counsels of Lady Frances, and the purposes of her obedient son, how soon we begin to see the real soul kindling under the proper and wellconsidered garments of the young man of fashion-the "rising man" of the "highest circles." Not that Mr Pelham is less real in his triflings than in his higher pursuits; there is so much vigour and unity in this gifted personage, that he enters into everything with gusto, and does his foppery as heartily as his statesmanship. Whether he is discussing most classic erudition with Vincent, or engaged in a course of moral philosophy with the respectable Job Johnson, or flirting with Lady Harriet, or dining with Lord Guloseton, there is always a sincere relish for his present occupation in the accomplished Mr Pelham. He is never awkward in his part, nor does it cost him trouble to cover his graver schemes with a veil of levity; for why, his levities and his schemes

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