The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎39r] (82/244)

—rr-r - ..I* lgi|HI > 1 1
1892 LORDLYT TON'S RANK 567
lie was still a boy, and under circnmstances whicli made her death
most bitter to him. I do not think he ever quite forgot this early-
grief, and traces of it may be found, if I mistake not, throughout his
writings.
He was launched early on the world. At seventeen, his uncle. Sir
Henry Bulwer, afterwards Lord Palling, obtained him his first nomina
tion in diplomacy, and he was sent abroad to shift as he could for
himself on a very insufficient allowance, which for a while even ceased
entirely. Lord Lytton has told me that at the time he was writing
Lucile he was without monfey-resources of any kind, and I know that
at another earlier period he Was within a little of committing suicide,
as an escape from miseries greater than he could bear.
"What saved him through all was his poetry. His first volume,
Clytemnestra, published when he was twenty-four under the name of
' Owen Meredith,' was a very clear success—as much so as Mr. Swin
burne's and the public praise it won gave him his first feeling
of self-confidence, and so the courage needed by his timid and sensitive
nature to fight out his life's battle. It was followed closely by
Wanderer, written for the greater part at Florence, and under the
double influence of a first passionate love and the intellectual com
panionship of the Brownings, with whom he long enjoyed the most
intimate and affectionate: relations. was at once
recognised at its worth, and, established his poetical fame above that
of any of his young contemporaries, and to the extent that for the
first time his father, who had hitherto underrated his son's abilities,
became aware of them, and 'was even, as I have heard, jealously
annoyed at his popularity) , It was indeed a wonderful volume, the
most wonderful perhaps in lyric poetry of any published in the present
half-century, and I am constantly astonished that it should not be
more widely acknowledged: as such by the present generation of
critics. Its only rivals seem-to me to be Swinburne's first volume
of Songs and Ballads, and Eossetti's volume containing
of Life. But: of this later., i i Lncile, published in 1861, completed
' Owen Meredith's' popularity,'! and literature opened wide to him
her ; fairest fields for his assured ambition. It was about this time
that I first remember to have^een him, a young man of twenty-nine,
with a beautiful dreamy;face and curly hair. I was passing through
Vienna, a young unpaid . on my way from Constantinople,
and had called at the. Euiba^sy, and fouiid him there with his friend
Julian Fane ^nd others in: the .Chancery. It was but a passing
gUpipse, but ; I J|ke to r^lli i^; and the picture which remains in my
mind of him as he sat WTiting, with one hand busy with his work
and the other caressing. : his: black poodle's head. There was some
thing typica^ in the audi thej act. He and Fane had just
published" their joint metriciil version of and his volume
of Servian Songs was in the press,.