A close examination, in fact, of the Autobiography results in confirming the historic truth of it. What is surprising is not, when we come to consider them, the incidents themselves, but Bulwer-Lytton's odd way of narrating them. Lord Lytton, without any comment, provides us with curious material for the verification of his grandfather's narrative. He prints, here and there, letters from entirely prosaic persons which tally, often to a surprising degree, with the extravagant statements of Bulwer-Lytton. To quote a single instance, of a very remarkable character, Bulwer-Lytton describes the effect his scholarship produced, at the age of seventeen, upon sober, elderly people, who were dazzled with his accomplishments and regarded him as a youthful prodigy. It is the sort of confession, rather full-blooded and lyrical, which we might easily set down to that phenomenon of refraction. But Lord Lytton prints a letter from Dr. Samuel Parr (whom, by the way, he calls "a man of sixty-four," but Parr, born in 1747, was seventy-four in 1821), which confirms the autobiographer's account in every particular. The aged Whig churchman, who boasted a wider knowledge of Greek literature than any other scholar of his day, and whose peremptory temper was matter of legend, could write to this Tory boy a long letter of enthusiastic criticism, and while assuring Bulwer-Lytton that he kept "all the letters with which you have honoured me," could add: "I am proud of such a correspondent; and, if we lived nearer to each other, I should expect to be very happy indeed in such a friend." Letters of this kind, judiciously printed by Lord Lytton in his notes, serve to call us back from the nebulous witchcraft in which Bulwer-Lytton was so fond of wrapping up the truth, and to remind us that, in spite of the necromancer, the truth is there.