Both are valuable to the
student of English history as presenting the fruits of his own historic
research.
The last and most decided, and, we may add, most beneficial, change in
Bulwer as a writer, was manifested in his publication of the _Caxtons_,
the chief merit of which is as an usher of the novels which were to
follow. Pisistratus Caxton is the modern Tristram Shandy, and becomes the
putative editor of the later novels. First of these is _My Novel, or
Varieties of English Life_. It is an admirable work: it inculcates a
better morality, and a sense of Christian duty, at which Pelham would have
laughed in scorn. Like it, but inferior to it, is _What Will He do with
It?_ which has an interesting plot, an elevated style, and a rare human
sympathy.
Among other works, which we cannot mention, he wrote _The New Timon_, and
_King Arthur_, in poetry, and a prose history entitled _Athens, its Rise
and Fall_.
Without the highest genius, but with uncommon scholarship and great
versatility, Bulwer has used the materials of many kinds lying about him,
to make marvellous mosaics, which imitate very closely the finest efforts
of word-painting of the great geniuses of prose fiction.
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