But this was far from being the opinion of the reading public. We have seen that he never failed, and sometimes he soared into the very empyrean of popularity. In 1834, when he published _The Last Days of Pompeii_, again in 1837 when he published _Ernest Maltravers_, the ecstasy of his adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under the mask of anonymity which he chose to assume. This was just before the outburst of the great school of Victorian novelists; Bulwer had as yet practically no one but Disraeli to compete with. These two, the author of _Pelham_ and the author of _Vivian Grey_, raced neck and neck at the head of the vast horde of "fashionable" novel-writers; now all but them forgotten. In Bulwer-Lytton's romances the reader moved among exalted personages, alternately flippant and sinister; a "mournful enthusiasm" was claimed for the writer by the readers of his day. It was the latest and most powerful development of that Byronic spirit which had been so shortlived in verse, but which was to survive in prose until Bulwer-Lytton adopted his _Caxtons_ manner in the middle of the century. As always in Byronic periods, the portrait of the author himself was searched for among his most fatal conceptions. To the young library subscriber the stoical, solitary figure of Mordaunt, in _The Disowned_, was exactly what was wanted as a representation of the mysterious novelist himself. Pelham was the apotheosis of the man of fashion, and it is amusing to read how, when the Bulwer-Lyttons travelled, they were gazed at in reverence as the Pelham and the Pelhamess.