Character as a Novelist.-Those of his novels which have their scene in Eng. land portray the society of the upper classes almost exclusively. They are full of life and energy, the characters are strongly marked, the plot is deeply laid, if not always probable, and the language flows smoothly, and, at times, even eloquently. It must be objected to his novels, however, that they have a feature of sameness. That is to say, the same fundamental characters of ex-minister, the young lord his friend, unknown heir, villain, etc., are repeated, in slightly varied forms, through a long series of works. The language, too, is often grandiloquent rather than eloquent, and the style is diffu e.

Bulwer cannot be said to have created any new types of character. He has portrayed certain features and elements of English society, and classified the characters which compose that society. But he has produced no grand creations, that will be handed down to coming generations as models- no such men and women as Jennie Deans, Caleb Balderstone, Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, Mrs. Ganıp, Mr. Micawber, and many others that might be selected from the works of his great contemporaries. Bulwer's historical novels display great reading and remarkable powers of invention; Harold, Rienzi, and The Last Days of Pompeii are, as art-constructions, superior to anything in their line except Thackeray's Esmond and Virginians. As a dramatist Bulwer can best be judged by the success of his Richelieu and his Lady of Lyons, standing pieces in every theatrical répertoire. The characters are well drawn and the action is intense. Bulwer's translations have the merit of being spirited and smooth, but not always close, renderings of the original.

LADY ROSINA BULWER-LYTTON, daughter of Francis Wheeler of Limerick, Ireland, and wife of Bulwer the novelist, has herself published several novels: Cheveley, or The Man of Honor; The Budget of the Bubble Family; Bianca Cappello, an Historical Romance; Memoirs of a Muscovite; The Peer's Daughters; Miriam Sedley; Behind the Scenes; The School for Husbands, etc.

RT. HON. SIR HENRY LYTTON EARLE BULWER, 1804, a brother of Sir Edward, is, like him, distinguished as an author and a diplomatist. Works: An Autumn in Greece; France, Social, Literary, and Political; The Monarchy of the Middle Classes; Historical Characters, Talleyrand, Cobbett, Mackintosh, and Canning.

Disraeli-Father and Son.

ISAAC DISRAELI, 1766-1848, was of Jewish extraction, the son of a Venetian merchant, but was born in England, near London, and was educated at Leyden and Amsterdam.

Having literary tastes, and ample means for their indulgence, Mr. Disraeli addicted himself through life to investigations which have redounded greatly to the benefit of English letters. At first he tried his hand at poetry, but finding the muses not propitious, he wisely forsook them, and confined himself thereafter to prose composition. Ile wrote: Curiosities of Literature; Calamities of Authors; Quarrels of Authors; Amenities of Literature; Literary Miscellany; Literary and Political Character of James I.; Life and Reign of Charles I., 5 vols., 8vo; Manners and Genius of the Literary Character; Dissertation on Anecdotes; The Genius of Judaism; Vaurien, a Satirical Novel; Flim Flams, or the Life of My Uncle, etc.

"He is one of the most learned, intelligent, lively, and agreeable authors of our era: he has composed a series of works, which, while they shed abundance of light on the character and condition of literary men, and show us the state of genius in their land, have all the attractions, for general readers, of the best romances.” — Allan Cunningham.

"We fear not to say, that no man who has perused these volumes [Curiosities of Literature] attentively, can fail to be a great, a very great deal more knowing than he was when he began."-Blackwood.

RT. HON. BENJAMIN DISRAELI, 1805 son of Isaac, added to the literary tastes of his father a strong passion and talent for political life.

Mr. Disraeli published his first work, Vivian Grey, in 1826, when he was only twentyone years old, and from that time to the present, now almost half a century, he has been a man of mark, and has been continually rising.

In political life, after several sharp contests and defeats, he succeeded in getting into Parliament. There he has signalized himself by brilliant abilities as a debater; he rose to be at different times Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, and finally, in 1868, to be Prime Minister. The tory and aristocratic party, of which he is a member, dislike and distrust him, but cannot dispense with the aid of a leader of such brilliant abilities, and have yielded some of their most cherished notions rather than break with him. "Gradually, almost imperceptibly, he has weaned his party from their most flagrant errors. He has taught them to profess, at any rate, and probably to feel, a sympathy for the great body of their country. men." London Times.

Busy as has been his political life, Mr. Disraeli has found leisure to keep himself constantly before the public as an author, and his publications have been almost as numerous as the years. His principal productions are the following: Vivian Grey; Voyage of Capt. Popanilla; The Young Duke; Contarini Fleming; Alroy, the Wondrous Tale; Henrietta Temple; Venetia; Coningsby, or the New Generation; Sibyl, or the New Nation; Ixion in Heaven; Tancred, or the New Crusade; Lothair. Besides his works of fiction, he has written several poems, but not of much note, and numerous political essays. He has edited most of the works of his father, and has written a Political Biography of Lord George Bentinck.

Lothair, the last of Mr. Disraeli's fictions, was written in the midst of his most engrossing occupations as a political leader in Parliament, and created a prodigious sensation on account of its but thinly veiled pictures of living men and women in the very highest circles of English society. A vein of scandal, indeed, runs through nearly all his fictions, beginning with Vivian Grey.

"He has written many works of fiction, all, we believe, successful, and some of them among the first of their time: some verse, in which he has rather tried than exercised his powers; and political essays, anonymous but acknowledged, in which the thing to be said was evidently much less valued than the manner of saying it. The Adventures of Capt. Popanilla deserves to be remembered as an admirable adaptation of Gulliver to later circumstances; and the Wondrous Tale of Alroy is a more imaginative attempt to naturalize in our language that rhyme and assonant prose which has so great a charm for Eastern ears." · Edinburgh Review.

Trollope-Mother and Sons.

MRS. FRANCES TROLLOPE,

1863, mother of the two distinguished sons of the same name, was herself a writer of no mean abilities.

Mrs. Trollope passed three years in America, and afterwards travelled and resided a number of years on the continent. In 1831 she published two volumes on the Domestic Manuers of the Americans, which gave great dissatisfaction to the nation de

scribed, and were also severely handled by critics in England. The book was one of the many of like kind on that subject, whose appearance forty or fifty years ago was the regular signal for denunciation and counter-denunciation. Mrs. Trollope's work contained a fair share of gossipy truth, many mistakes, and not a few absurdities. It was succeeded by one or two other books of travel, and a formidable list of novels, which were in great favor at the time, but which are now neglected for more recent favorites.

"Mrs. Trollope's chief defect is coarseness and violence of contrast; she does not know where to stop, and is too apt to render her characters not ridiculous only, but odious, in which she offends against the primary laws of comic writing. Moreover, she neglects light and shade in her pictures; her personages are either mere embodiments of all that is contemptible, or cold abstractions of everything refined and excellent. Her best work is, perhaps, The Widow Barnaby,' in which she has reached the ideal of a character of gross, full-blown, palpable, complete pretension and vulgar assurance. The widow, with her coarse, handsome face, and her imperturbable, unconquerable self-possession, is a truly rich comic conception."-- Shaw.

Mr. Trollope was employed for a number of years in the English Post-Office Department. He does not appear to have prosecuted his studies any farther than in the public schools of Winchester and Harrow. His career as a novelist was begun comparatively late in life, in 1847, by the publication of the Macdermots of Ballycloran.

Mr. Trollope's subsequent novels are so numerous and so uniformly good that it is rather difficult to specialize among them. La Vendée, Barchester Towers, The Bertrams, Orley Farm, may perhaps be cited as the best. Besides his novels, Mr. Trollope has published several volumes of travel, the best known of which are The West Indies and the Spanish Main, and North America. He has also contributed largely to the magazines and weekly papers of London.

Character as a Novelist.-As a writer of prose fiction, Mr. Trollope may be set down as among the very foremost in the second class-reserving the first class for such magnates as Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and Bulwer. He has not created any really great characters, either male or female, or invented any remarkable narratives. But, on the other hand, his novels are intensely realistic portraitures of English social life. The women, in particular, interest us because they are the same, slightly idealized, it is true, that we meet, or should be glad to meet, in our everyday life, the fresh, healthy outgrowths of the cultured classes of England.

All Mr. Trollope's works are clothed in an atmosphere of healthy and robust purity, alike removed from sentimentality and extravagance. These qualities, combined with ease of style, have procured for the author an immense popularity which shows no signs of diminution. The student of English manners can find no apter illustration, perhaps, of the contrast between the present century and the past, than by comparing Tom Jones with the exquisite little story of Orley Farm.

THOMAS ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE, 1810

a brother of the novel

ist Anthony Trollope, is himself a novelist of repute and also an historian.

Mr. Trollope, who was educated at Oxford, has been a permanent resident of Flor

ence for the last twenty years and more. He had travelled extensively on the conti nent before that time. Many of his novels are illustrative of Italian life and history. Among them are Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar, La Beata, Guilio Malatesta, Beppo the Conscript, etc. Among his biographical sketches are A Decade of Italian Women, The Girlhood of Catharine di Medici and Filippo Strozzi. He has also published several volumes of sketches of travel, such as A Summer in Brittany, A Summer in Western France, A Lenten Journey in Umbria and the Marches of Ancona. On the other hand, Lindisfarm Chase, Artingale Castle, and the Garstangs of Garstang Grange are stories of England.

Mr. Trollope's great work, however, is his History of the Commonwealth of Florence to the Fall of the Republic (1531), published in 1865. Of this it is safe to say that it is one of the most valuable contributions to special history that our literature possesses. The theme is splendidly fascinating, and the historian has spared no trouble or time in investigating original works and documents. The work reads more like a romance than a sober historical narrative. The author may be reproached, perhaps, with diffuseness, and his style is occasionally undignifiedly familiar. But he has certainly succeeded in portraying the wonderful Italian republic in all its glory, its meanness, its greatness, its weakness, its party strife, its art splendor, and its sudden catastrophe.

Mr. Reade studied at Oxford, and was admitted to the bar, but seems to have given up the law entirely for letters. His first novel, Peg Woffington, appeared in 1852, and established his fame. It is unsurpassed, in true artistic merit, by any of its more ambitious successors. The most important of these are Christie Johnstone, Never too Late to Mend, White Lies, Love Me Little Love Me Long, The Cloister and the Hearth, Hard Cash, Griffith Gaunt, Foul Play (written conjointly with Boucicault), and Put Yourself in His Place.

Character as a Writer.- Mr. Reade's merits and failings have been so much discussed of late,- in the controversy over Griffith Gaunt,- that they need not be repeated here in detail. No English novelist has ever surpassed him in the ability to delineate human character, and lay bare the springs of human action. We may dislike the personages themselves, and object to the general tendency of the works as prejudicial to sound morality, but we cannot refrain from admiring the ease and precision of the writer's art. Charles Reade's men and women, passionate and unscrupulous as they may often be, are creatures of flesh and blood, and not mere lay-figures. Particularly is this true of the women characters. Here Reade is infinitely superior to Dickens, and even surpasses Thackeray, except when the latter is at his very best. In this respect Reade is inferior, if to any one, only to "George Eliot," and even this inferiority is not due so much to the manner of execution as to the quality of the characters portrayed.

The dialogue in Reade's works is easy, and the descriptions are graphic. The style throughout is the full and hearty expression of intense emotional life. It must be noted, however, that Reade, in his later works, shows strong symptoms of mannerism and a disposition to rely upon sensational positions and unnatural effects. Certainly no other of Reade's works will compare with the simplicity and the fresh exuberance of Peg Woffington. Griffith Gannt is perhaps the most striking. It is a very artistic presentment of a very hateful theme. The general conception and atmosphere of the

piece place it in the French school. Instead of treating the dark side of married life as a tremendous ethical and psychological problem, as Goethe has done in his Elective Affinities, Reade regards it rather as a background that may serve to lighten the brilliant forms and trappings of the actors.

It should also be borne in mind that several of Reade's works, especially his Never too Late to Mend, and his Put Yourself in His Place, belong to the class of novels known as tendency-pieces, i. e., works of imagination intended to effect some ulterior object. Generally, as in the case of these two under discussion, the ulterior object is some social reform, which the writer hopes to bring about by showing, by means of concrete, living example, the pressing want of improvement. Thus, Never too Late to Mend was a vigorous protest against the then existing prison-system of England, and Put Yourself in His Place was intended to show the evils of Trades Unions. The great danger, for all such tendency-pieces, is that unless they possess some general human interest, over and above this special theme, they will themselves pass away. with the evil which they have helped to destroy.

WILLIAM W. READE, ————— ———, a nephew of Charles Reade, and a graduate of Oxford, has written several works: Charlotte and Myra, a Puzzle; Liberty Hall, a Story of Colleges; The Veil of Isis, or the Mysteries of the Druids; Savage Africa, a book of wild travel, etc.

Mayne Reid.

CAPTAIN MAYNE REID, 1818 -, is the author of a large number of works descriptive of adventure, half fact, half fiction, which are chiefly captivating as boys' books.

Capt. Reid was a native of the north of Ireland, and began studying for the ministry. Impelled by a love of adventure, he abandoned his theological studies, and in 1838 migrated to the United States. Here he passed several years in travelling through the Indian country. After returning to civilization, he contributed largely to the press of New York and Philadelphia. In 1845 he enlisted as a volunteer, and served through the Mexican War. In 1849, he was about to join the Hungarian revolutionists, when he learned of Görgey's surrender. He thereupon settled in London, and began that series of boys' books of adventure which has since carried his name over both continents.

The list of his publications up to date is very long. There are forty odd works, written in the same general style. The best of them are, perhaps, The Rifle Rangers, The Boy Hunters, The English Family Robinson, The Forest Exiles. They have been highly commended for the freshness and accuracy of their descriptions, and their general healthy tone.

Charles Kingsley.

REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, 1819, has gained distinction in several walks of literature, but is chiefly known as a novelist.

Mr. Kingsley is a native of Devonshire. He was educated at Cambridge, and is a clergyman of the Church of England, belonging to what is known as the "Broad Church Party."

Mr. Kingsley is one of the most popular authors of the century. His first work of prominence was Alton Locke, a novel depicting the times of the Chartist troubles in England. This was followed by Yeast, in 1851; by Hypatia, in 1853, the scene of which is laid in Alexandria during the times of the early Christian Church; West