by his own showing, was made to appear in so unworthy a light that his son promptly appealed to the law to suppress the book. Now, however, the same friend, Louisa Devey, has prepared a "Life of Rosina, Lady Bulwer" (Swann, Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., London), which is based upon this correspondence, upon the writings of Lady Bulwer, and upon the accounts which she herself gave to the biographer.
It is not necessary to accept everything in Louisa Devey's book as the truth. Lady Bulwer was no angel. She was violent in temper, narrow in mind, bitter in her prejudices. The novels which she published, in which she attacked not only her husband but all his circle of friends,—Dickens, Disraeli, Thackeray, Palmerston, etc.,—simply overshot the mark by their violence. They are vulgar, foolish, execrable in taste, weak in grammar, weak in syntax, strong only in vituperation. The public read the books, laughed at them, and speedily forgot them. They were excusable in looking upon them as the merest vagaries of insanity. But this only made the pathos of the poor lady's position more poignant. After all possible allowances, there is no doubt that she was cruelly, even barbarously, wronged by her husband. He was unfaithful to her, lied to her, deceived her; he made her life wretched by his arrogant and overbearing temper; once at least he kicked her, and once he bit her savagely in the cheek. After the separation he dogged her footsteps with spies, in the hope of convicting her of some divorceable offence. In Paris a disgraceful public scandal was occasioned by the arrest and trial of some of his emissaries caught in the act of purloining her private papers. It may be that the young and the enthusiastic, if in these days any such still worship Bulwer, will be disillusioned by this bare statement of facts; but isn't it just as well that the truth should be known, that the sham should be unveiled
The most interesting of recent literary "finds," next to that of the two lost parts of "The Journey from Parnassus," is a satire entitled "The Poets and Poetry of America" (Benjamin & Bell, New York), the editor of which, "Geoffrey Quarles," in an introductory argument which is written understandingly and ably reasoned, seeks to prove that its author was Edgar Allan Poe. He makes out an excellent case, the strong points of which are as follows. The satire was published in 1847, under the pseudonyme of "Lavante." The year 1847 has been looked upon as the most unproductive in Poe's literary career. In March of that year he had announced as soon to appear "The Authors of America, in Prose and Verse;" but the only known product of his pen during that year was the short poem "Ulalume," which appeared anonymously. May not this satire have been the final form of his proposed "Authors of America"? He had written on the subject of poetical satire, once in a review of Lowell's "Fable for Critics," and, again in one of Wilmer's "Quacks of Helicon," suggesting in each case that the heroic couplet of Pope and Dryden was the best form for satiric verse. This satire is in heroic couplets. The unfamiliarity of the metre makes it difficult to recognize in it any of the peculiar characteristics of Poe's poetical style. Indeed, it may be owned at once that the satire; has no poetical merit; but, then, did not Poe himself assert that "a satire, of course, is no poem"? In all other respects it tallies perfectly with what we know about Poe. It praises the Southern authors and attacks the Northern, just as Poe did in his critical essays. Yet Poe himself is never mentioned in it. The judgments on Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Dana,
