Het dagboek van de student Nicolaas Beets, 1833-1836

Leiden, zondag 7 juni 1835

Leiden 7 Juni.

I finish the lecture of Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeï.⁶⁵⁶ Whatever a french Critic⁶⁵⁷ may have said against it, assuring the credulous that it is not worth reading but for the name of the author, it is a superior work, considered either as a work of imagination and as an essay on antiquity. Prof Geel told me the other day he could not discover a single mistake in the description of antique manners and morals, and as for the different characters brought in, they all had the very stamp of the period they are placed in.

656 The Last Days of Pompeii (1834): meest bekende roman van Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873).

657 In ‘Edward Litton Bulwer, Les derniers jours de Pompéi’ van L.D. Forgues, verschenen in de Revue de Paris van januari 1835, pp. 75-94, wordt Bulwer onder meer als een modieuze navolger van Walter Scott beschouwd.