The cardinal importance, then, of Poe as a poet is that he restored to poetry a primitive faculty of which civilisation seemed successfully to have deprived her. He rejected the doctrinal expression of positive things, and he insisted upon mystery and symbol. He endeavoured to clothe unfathomable thoughts and shadowy images in melody that was like the wind wandering over the strings of an æolian harp. In other words, he was the pioneer of a school which has spread its influence to the confines of the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature. He was the discoverer and the founder of Symbolism. 1909. [Footnote 6: A shocking false quantity; but how little that would matter to Poe] THE AUTHOR OF "PELHAM" One hundred and twenty years have nearly passed since the birth of Bulwer-Lytton, and he continues to be suspended in a dim and ambiguous position in the history of our literature. He combined extraordinary qualities with fatal defects. He aimed at the highest eminence, and failed to reach it, but he was like an explorer, who is diverted from the main ascent of a mountain, and yet annexes an important table-land elsewhere. Bulwer-Lytton never secured the ungrudging praise of the best judges, but he attained great popularity, and has even now not wholly lost it. He is never quoted as one of our great writers, and yet he holds a place of his own from which it is improbable that he will ever be dislodged. Although he stood out prominently among his fellows, and although his career was tinged with scandal and even with romance, very little has been known about him. Curiosity has been foiled by the discretion of one party and the malignity of another. The public has not been in a position to know the truth, nor to possess the real portrait of a politician and a man of letters who has been presented as an angel and as a gargoyle, but never as a human being. Forty years after his death the candour and the skill of his grandson reveal him to us at last in a memoir of unusual excellence.