It was some years before the passage of the Reform bill, and before the death of George IV., that Bulwer[57] blazed out in _Pelham_ (1828), _The Disowned_, and _Devereux_, making conquest of the novel-reading town, at a time when _Quentin Durward_ (1823) was not an old book, and _Woodstock_ (1826) still fresh. And if Pelhamism had its speedy subsidence, the same writer put such captivating historic garniture and literary graces about the Italian studies of _Rienzi_, and of the _Last Days of Pompeii_, as carry them now into most libraries, and insure an interested reading--notwithstanding a strong sensuous taint and sentimental extravagances. He had scholarship; he had indefatigable industry; he had abounding literary ambitions and enthusiasms, but he had no humor; I am afraid he had not a very sensitive conscience; and he had no such pervading refinement of literary taste as to make his work serve as the exemplar for other and honester workers. Benjamin Disraeli[58] in those days overmatched him in cravats and in waistcoats, and was the veriest fop of all fop-land. No more beautiful accessory could be imagined to the drawing-room receptions over which Lady Blessington presided, and of which the ineffable Comte d’Orsay was a shining and a fixed light, than this young Hebraic scion of a great Judean house--whose curls were of the color of a raven’s wing, and whose satin trumpery was ravishing! And yet--this young foppish Disraeli, within fifty years, held the destinies of Great Britain in his hand, and had endowed the Queen with the grandest title she had ever worn--that of Empress of India. Still further, in virtue of his old friendship for his fellow fop Bulwer, he sends the son of that novelist (in the person of the second Lord Lytton) to preside over a nation numbering two hundred millions of souls. Whoever can accomplish these ends with such a people as that of Great Britain must needs have something in him beyond mere fitness for the pretty salons of my Lady Blessington.