Sir Edward Bulwer (1805-1873), afterward Lord Lytton, attained a moderate success in several departments of literature, but he succeeded best in the drama and the novel. Dramatic fame came to him with his Richelieu, his Lady of Lyons, and his Money; and a long list of novels gave him a good position, though not quite of the first class, among English novelists. His first novel of any importance, Pelham, a tale of fashionable life, appeared in 1828, giving him great and immediate popularity. Like most of his works, it is non-historical. It was followed by others of the same general kind, in some of which the author offended England's moral sense by striving to make heroes of such criminals as a highwayman, a counterfeiter, and a poisoner. Among his works are four notable historical novels: the Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi (1835), the Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold (1845). The last of these adheres more closely to history, probably, than any other novel in English. Bulwer's pictures of times past are very clear and very distinct, yet they do not impress the reader with the same naturalness and truth that characterize those of Scott.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was born at Landport, Hampshire, and was the son of John Dickens, a poorly paid and not very energetic clerk in the government

service. Owing to his father's lack of means, the son received little schooling none after his fourteenth year. He loved literature, especially fiction, from his childhood, and he was early acquainted with the works of Defoe, Smollett, and Goldsmith, with some essays of the Spectator type, and with some translations, such as the Arabian Nights and Gil Blas. At work at an early age to earn his own living, and that at not very dignified employment nor at a very enviable remuneration, young Dickens soon acquired that experience of poverty, the struggle for existence, and the under side of life generally, that enabled him afterward to write with such pathos of the trials, the temptations, the sorrows, and the sins of the poor. Serving for a time as office-boy for a firm of lawyers, he studied stenography, and became, in 1834, a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. From reporting, he passed easily to original writing, and the first of the Sketches by Boz was printed in the Old Monthly Magazine the same year. Other sketches followed, and these were grouped together and published in a volume in 1836. About this time, the great London firm of Chapman and Hall contemplated publishing a series of comic plates by George Seymour, and a man was needed to write appropriate sketches to accompany the several plates. The firm applied to Dickens, and readily acceded to his suggestion that the different sketches

should be connected one with another so as to form a continuous whole. Thus came into existence the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The first number was published in 1836, and was immediately and. wonderfully popular. Seymour committed suicide shortly afterward, and the illustrating was continued by Hablot Browne, better known as "Phiz." As paper after paper came out, England awoke to the fact that a new genius had come upon the scene.

The prospects were so wonderfully promising that Dickens gave himself up entirely to writing, and he wrote with a rapidity almost equal to that of Scott. The most important of his later works are: Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), Dombey and Son (1847-1848), David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), and Little Dorrit (1854-1855). Of all his works probably the most popular was Pickwick, and it is still a prime favorite; but it is interesting to remember that David Copperfield, which contains many of the author's personal experiences, was Dickens's own favorite.

Dickens's style is not elegant, but it is plain, clear, and generally free from needless verbiage. He has two chief qualities, humor and pathos. To the world for which he wrote, these appealed with equal force, but his pathos has done its work, and he is coming to be esteemed rather as a portrayer of the humorous

than of the pathetic. His genuine sympathy with the poor and oppressed made him a more powerful instrument for the betterment of the condition of the lower classes than preacher or student of social science. A story frequently reaches men's hearts more effectively than a dry, prosy sermon or an intellectual dissertation, and it frequently reaches more of them; and this is what the stories of Dickens did.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was born in Calcutta, and was the son of Richmond Thackeray, an employee of the East India Company. His father having died in 1816, and his mother married again, the child was sent to an aunt in England. She placed him in the great Charterhouse school, where he remained six years, afterward spending nearly two years at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the university he attracted much attention by his facility in satirical writing, and in drawing, especially in caricature. Leaving Cambridge, he went, in 1831, to the Continent to study drawing. After two years spent in the art centres of Germany, France, and Italy, he found that his expensive tastes had dissipated much of the considerable wealth left him by his father, and that he had accomplished very little in his art studies. He returned to England and tried journalism without

success.

He then turned to drawing again, went to

Paris once more to study, and made excellent use of his time and opportunities. In England again, he unsuccessfully tried to arrange with Dickens to illustrate the Pickwick Papers after Seymour had committed suicide, joined the staff of Fraser's Magazine, and was later connected with the great London Punch. His Yellowplush Papers were contributed to Fraser's, and his Book of Snobs to Punch. In 1846, his Vanity Fair began to come out in monthly parts, and, at its completion, in 1848, he found himself on the highroad to success. His other important works were published within the next few years: Pendennis in 1850, Henry Esmond in 1852-1854, The Newcomes in 1853–1855, and The Virginians, a sequel to Esmond, in 1857-1859.

Thackeray prepared two courses of lectures that were quite popular in their day, one on the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century (1851), and the other on The Four Georges (1853). Though both courses are still published and still read, neither is now considered as of special value. When the Cornhill Magazine was established, in 1860, he became its editor, but he withdrew from the management of it two years afterward. He contributed to it his Roundabout Papers, the Adventures of Philip, and Lovel, the Widower; and his unfinished Denis Duval appeared in it after his death.

Thackeray's novels may all be classed as society