Few writers have done more, or achieved higher distinction in
various walks--as a novelist, poet, dramatist, historian, essayist,
orator, and politician. He has worked his way step by step,
disdainful of ease, and animated throughout by the ardent desire to
excel. On the score of mere industry, there are few living English
writers who have written so much, and none that have produced so
much of high quality. The industry of Bulwer is entitled to all
the greater praise that it has been entirely self-imposed. To
hunt, and shoot, and live at ease,--to frequent the clubs and enjoy
the opera, with the variety of London visiting and sight-seeing
during the "season," and then off to the country mansion, with its
well-stocked preserves, and its thousand delightful out-door
pleasures,--to travel abroad, to Paris, Vienna, or Rome,--all this
is excessively attractive to a lover of pleasure and a man of
fortune, and by no means calculated to make him voluntarily
undertake continuous labour of any kind. Yet these pleasures, all
within his reach, Bulwer must, as compared with men born to similar
estate, have denied himself in assuming the position and pursuing
the career of a literary man. Like Byron, his first effort was
poetical ('Weeds and Wild Flowers'), and a failure.
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