But they require a patient reader, and one who can content himself with a long protracted and most unemotional excitement.

The sublimity which is effected by sparkling speeches is better, if the speeches really have something in them beneath the sparkles.

Those of Bulwer generally have.

Those of his imitators are often without anything, the sparkles even hardly sparkling.

At the best they fatigue; and a novel, if it fatigues, is unpardonable.