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I was amused at the difference between Lord Lytton's way of greeting me and his treatment of Sir William Anson.
"Well, the darling is handsome enough to have half-a-dozen," said gay Mrs. Eustace Wingfield. "Forestalling the advanced method in Lytton's 'New Utopia," said Mrs. Claxton. "There would be an absence of the usual mother-in-law difficulty," lisped a young Government attache, meekly, who had recently married the only child of her mother.
Some of Lytton's letters had to be kept under lock and key or put in the fire for safer guardianship. Lytton had a private press at which some of his correspondent's letters were printed, and Fitzjames warns him against the wiles of editors of newspapers in a land where subordinates are not inaccessible to corruption.
But perhaps Lord Elcho expressed the feeling which predominated in the Gilded Chamber when he expressed the opinion that the Bill was the product of "Brummagem girondists." In the event, as we have seen, Lord Lytton's warning bore fruit, and the Bill was passed. "There is scarcely a less dignified entity," as Disraeli had said in Coningsby thirty years before, "than a patrician in a panic."
My father was fond of reading, and for a man of his limited means, possessed a good collection of books; a considerable number of the volumes of Bohn's Standard Library as well as Boswell's Life of Johnson, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Butler's Hudibras, Bailey's Festus, Gil Blas, Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, the Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, most of the poets from Chaucer down; and of novels, Bulwer Lytton's, Scott's, Dickens' and Thackeray's.
Bulwer Lytton's "Last Days of Pompeii," and "Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings," are both powerful, ingenious, and interesting narratives, and they give as definite an idea, perhaps, of the times of which they treat as is possible after so long a lapse of time. "Rienzi" leaves a greater impression of verisimilitude.
Bentham's Works, vol. i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton's England and the English , p. 469. This passage was written by Mill, cf. preface.
A form of literature so very innocent and primitive looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton's conscious and highly-coloured style. It may be bad taste, but sometimes we should prefer a few sentences of plain prose narration, and a little Bewick by way of tail-piece.
During the last wretched days I had spent with Minna at Blasewitz, I had read Bulwer Lytton's novel, Rienzi; during my convalescence in the bosom of my sympathetic family, I now worked out the scheme for a grand opera under the inspiration of this book.
Soon after Lord Lytton's departure there was some talk of Fitzjames's resuming his old place upon the retirement of Lord Hobhouse, by whom he had been succeeded. It went so far that Maine asked him to state his views for the information of Lord Salisbury. Fitzjames felt all his old eagerness.
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