Bulwer-Lytton was born on the fringe of the aristocratic region. He can hardly be said to belong to the genuine aristocracy, although of late, thanks to his political opinions and his peerage, he has come to be ranked among aristocrats. He is the brother of a distinguished diplomatist, Sir Henry Bulwer, and the father of a somewhat promising diplomatist, not quite unknown to Washington people, Robert Lytton, "Owen Meredith." Bulwer-Lytton had advanced tolerably far upon his career when he inherited through his mother a magnificent estate, which enabled him to set up for an aristocrat. His baronetcy had been conferred upon him by the Crown, as his peerage lately was. He started in political life, like Mr. Disraeli, as a Liberal; indeed, it was, if I am not greatly mistaken, on the introduction of Bulwer-Lytton that Disraeli obtained the early patronage of Daniel O'Connell, which he so soon forfeited by the political tergiversation that drew down from the great Agitator the famous outburst of fierce and savage scorn wherein, alluding to Disraeli's boasted Jewish origin, he proclaimed him evidently descended in a right line from the blasphemous thief who died impenitent on the cross. Disraeli's apostasy was sudden and glaring, and he kept the field. Bulwer-Lytton soon faded out of politics altogether for nearly thirty years, and when he reappeared in the House of Commons and wore the garb of a Tory, his old friend and political patron O'Connell had long become a mere tradition. Nearly all of those who listened with curiosity to Bulwer-Lytton's speeches in 1859 and 1860, were curious only to hear how a great romancist and dramatist would acquit himself in a part which, so far as they were concerned, was entirely a new appearance. They had no personal memory of his former efforts; no recollection of the time when the young author of the sparkling, piquant, and successful "Pelham" endeavored to take London by storm as a political orator, and failed in the enterprise.