“He had” she wrote, “just returned from Paris, and was resplendent with French polish, so far as boots went. His cobweb cambric shirt-front was a triumph of lace and embroidery, a combination never seen in this country till six or seven years later, except on babies’ frocks. Studs, too, except in racing stables, were then non est, but a perfect galaxy glittered along the milky way down the centre of this fairy-like lingerie. Poor D’Orsay’s linen gauntlets had not yet burst upon the London world, but like the little source of a mighty river, Mr. Lytton Bulwer had three inches of cambric encircling his coat cuffs, and fastened with jewelled sleeve-links. And though it then wanted full five years till every man in society was caned, he also dangled from his ungloved and glittering right hand, a somewhat gorgeously jewelled-headed ebony cane, and the dangling was of the scientific kind that had evidently been ‘learnt, marked, and inwardly digested.’ Miss Landon and I both laughed as I exclaimed:
‘Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain,
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane.’”
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Lord Lytton’s most successful drama “The Lady of Lyons, or Love and Pride,” was produced at Covent Garden Theatre, London, on February 15, 1838, when Mr. Macready played Claude Melnotte, and Pauline was impersonated by Miss Helen Faucit, now Lady Theodore Martin. The plot of the play is absurd and preposterous in the highest degree, yet Lytton acknowledged that, such as it was, it had been suggested to him by a pretty little tale called “The Bellows Mender.” Possibly the success of Lytton’s play put others on the scent of his original, for on February 7, 1842, a domestic drama in three acts, entitled “Perourou, the Bellows Mender, and the Beauty of Lyons,” by W. T. Moncrieff, was produced at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Stilted in language, full of clap-trap sentiment, and utterly destitute of poetry, it is still easy to see that it had a common origin with The Lady of Lyons, from which it differed in many respects, and was inferior in all.
A favourite piece of clap-trap in Lytton’s drama is
MELNOTTES VISIONARY HOME.
Nay, dearest, nay, if thou would’st have me paint,
The home to which, could love fulfil its prayers
This hand would lead thee, listen—a deep vale,