Austen's death, forcing its way, and wrote _The Caxtons_, _My Novel_, and _What will he do with it?_--books which to some have seemed his greatest triumphs. The veering of that taste back again to tales of terror was acknowledged by _A Strange Story_, which, in 1861, created an excitement rarely, if ever, caused by the work of a man who had been writing for more than a generation; while _The Haunted and the Haunters_, a brief ghost-story contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_, has always seemed to the present writer the most perfect thing that he ever did, and one of the most perfect things of its kind ever done. In the very last years of his life, the wonderful _girouette_ of his imagination felt other popular gales, and produced--partly as novels of actual society, partly as Janus-faced satires of what was and what might be--_The Coming Race_, _Kenelm Chillingly_, and the posthumous _Parisians_. But this list of novels, which does not include by name much more than two-thirds of his actual production, by no means exhausts Lord Lytton's literary work. For some years, chiefly before he had passed middle life, he was an active dramatist, and at least three of his plays--_The Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_, and _Money_--had a success (not merely passing, and in the first case at least permanent) which few if any other plays of the century have had. He was always returning to verse, though never with real poetical success; the exceptions which may be urged most forcibly being his translations from Schiller, a congenial original. He was at one time editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_. He translated freely, he wrote much criticism,--which is often in isolated passages, if not so often in general drift and grasp, extremely good,--and he was a constant essayist in very various kinds. It is probable that if his entire works were ever collected, which is not likely, few, if any, authors of the nineteenth century, though it be one of unbridled writing and printing, could equal him in volume; while it is certain that very few indeed could produce more numerous testimonials of the kind given by the immediate, and not merely immediate, success of separate works.