When the purely domestic kind came in he made them, earlier and deeper still, with _The Caxtons_ (1850), _My Novel_ (1853), etc.

He caught the "sensation" ball at nearly its first service with his old "mystery" racket, and played the most brilliant game of the whole tournament in _A Strange Story_ (1862).

At the last he tried later kinds still in books like _The Coming Race_ (1871), _The Parisians_ (1873), and _Kenelm Chillingly_.

And once, Pallas being kind, he did an almost perfect thing (there is not a speck or a flaw in it except, perhaps, the mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one of the best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction known to the world, in the ghost-story of _The Haunted and the Haunters_ (1859).
Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department.
And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist.

That this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish, half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is probably true.