Thus then, using with inexhaustible energy and perseverance his wonderful gifts as an intellectual mechanician, Edward Bulwer-Lytton went on from 1828 to 1860 grinding out of his mill an almost unbroken succession of novels and romances to suit all changes in public taste. I do not believe he changed his themes and ways of treating them purposely, to suit the changes of public taste; but rather that, being a man of no true original and creative power, his style and his views were modified by the modifying conditions of successive years. Some new idea, some new way of looking at this or that question of human life came up, and it attracted him who was always a close and diligent student of the world and its fashions; and he made it into a romance. Whatever new schools of fiction came into existence, Bulwer-Lytton, always directing the new ideas into the channel where popular and elementary sympathies flowed freely, succeeded in turning each change to advantage, and keeping his place. Dickens sprang up and founded a school; and yet Bulwer-Lytton held his own. Thackeray arose and established a new school, and Bulwer-Lytton, whom no human being would have thought of comparing with either as a man of genius, did not lose a reader. Charlotte Brontë came like a shadow, and so departed; George Eliot gave a new lift and life to romance; the realistic school was followed by the sensational school; the Literature of Adultery ran its vulgar course--and Bulwer-Lytton remained where he always had been, and moulted no feather.