The personages talk in glittering dialogues, throwing about philosophy, science, and the classics, in a manner which is always suggestive and often amusing.

The book is brilliant with intellect.

But no word is ever spoken as it would have been spoken;--no detail is ever narrated as it would have occurred.

Bulwer no doubt regarded novels as romantic, and would have looked with contempt on any junction of realism and romance, though, in varying his work, he did not think it beneath him to vary his sublimity with the ludicrous.

The sublime in novels is no doubt most effective when it breaks out, as though by some burst of nature, in the midst of a story true to life.