In fact, all through Lord Lytton's distinguished career, as his father
had done before him, he found recreation in change of employment. As
forcibly and eloquently stated by his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, in
her introduction to the 1894 edition of his Selected Poems, "The minds
of both were ceaselessly active, and they turned without a pause from
one kind of thought and business to another as readily as they turned
from either to easy, disengaged conversation. Had the rival calls of
his many-sided intellect been at variance, the poet in my father would
always have had the preference."
Ali Baba, it may be taken for granted, did not intend to characterise
as "a flood of twaddle" the whole of Lord Lytton's verse. Poetry
which, as far as published up to 1855, called forth from Leigh Hunt
warm praise for its beauties and mercy for its defects, in these words
embodied in a letter to Mr. John Forster, the friend and biographer of
Charles Dickens.--
"I have read every bit of Owen Meredith's [his now
well-known pseudonym] volume, and it has left me in a state
of delighted admiration.
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