CHARLES LEVER AT HOME.
The man whose rollicking pen has made more dragoons than all the recruiting-sergeants in her Britannic Majesty’s service; who has “promoted” the “Connaught Rangers” and Faugh a ballaghs into corps d’élite; who has broken more bones across country than the six-foot stone walls of Connemara; whose pictures of that land “which smiles through her tears like a sunbeam in showers” are as racy of the soil as her own emerald shamrock; who has painted Irish girls pure as angels’ whispers, bright as saucy streamlets, and the “boys” a bewildering compound of fun, fight, frolic, and “divarshin”; whose career was as stainless as his success was merited, and whose memory is an heirloom—was born in the city of Dublin in the year of grace 1806. Graduating at Cambridge University, and subsequently at the U-niversity of Göttingen, his student-life betrayed no symptoms of the mental élan which was to distinguish him later on, and, save for its Bohemianism, was absolutely colorless, and even dull. The boy was not father to the man. Selecting the medical profession as much by chance as predilection, he succeeded, during the visitation of cholera in 1832, in obtaining an appointment as medical superintendent in the northwest of Ireland, in the districts of Londonderry and Coleraine, and for a time continued to “guess at prescriptions, invent ingredients,” and generally administer to the requirements of afflicted humanity. But the task was uncongenial, the life a dead-level, flavored with no spice of variety, uncheckered in its monotonous routine. It was a “bad billet, an’ no Christian man cud live in it, barrin’ a say-gull or a dispinsiry docthor.” Doctor Lever!—pshaw! Charley Lever; who ever thinks of the author of Harry Lorrequer as Doctor Lever? Nevertheless, his experiences at this period bore him rich fruit in the after-time, and in Billy Traynor, “poet, peddler, and physician” (The Fortunes of Glencore), we have a type of the medical men with whom he was then associated. “I am the nearest thing to a doctor going,” says Billy. “I can breathe a vein against any man in the barony. I can’t say that for any articular congestion of the aortis valve, or for a seropulmonic diathesis, d’ye mind, that there isn’t as good as me; but for the ould school of physic, the humoral diagnostic touch, who can beat me?” The hedge-doctor and hedge-schoolmaster, pedants both, are now an institution of the past.
Charles Lever, however, was not destined to blush unseen or waste his sweetness on a country practice. Appointed to the Legation at Brussels, he bounded from the dreary drudgery of a dispensary to the glittering gayety of an embassy, from the hideous squalor of the fever-reeking cabin to the coquettish gravity of the palatial sick-room. In “Belgium’s capital” the cacoethes scribendi seized him, and the result was Harry Lorrequer. He awoke, and, like Lord Byron, found himself famous. The distinct portraiture, the brilliant style, the thoroughly Hibernian ensemble, claimed a well-merited success for the book, and, written at the right moment—how many good works have perished by being floated on an ebb tide!—the public, who had hitherto accepted Ireland through the clever but trashy effusions of Lady Morgan, and the more genuine metal of Maria Edgeworth and Samuel Lover, joyously turned towards the rising sun, and, seizing upon this genuine bit of shillelah, clamorously demanded a fresh sprig from the same tree. The wild dash, as exhilarating as “mountain dew,” the breezy freshness, the gay abandon of society and soldiering, the “moving accidents by flood and field,” acted upon the jaded palates of the British public like a tonic, and Harry Lorrequer, instead of being treated as an entrée, became respected as the pièce de résistance. Harry’s appearance on parade with the Othello blacking still upon his face; Miss Betty O’Dowd’s visit to Callonby on the “low-backed car”; her desire of disowning the nondescript vehicle, and its being announced by her shock-headed retainer as “the thing you know is at the doore”; the description of boarding-house life in Dublin sixty years ago; Mrs. Clanfrizzle’s, in Molesworth Street—the establishment is still in existence, and may be recognized in Lisle House; the “amateur hotel,” so graphically described by Mr. Lever; the picture of “dear, dirty Dublin” itself:
“Oh! Dublin, sure there is no doubtin’,
Beats every city upon the say;
’Tis there you’ll see O’Connell spoutin’
And Lady Morgan making tay”;
a night at Howth; the Knight of Kerry and Billy McCabe—form a succession of sketches teeming with vivacity, humor, and wit, and dashed off with a pen which almost makes a steeplechaser of the reader, so exciting and so rapid is the pace.
To Lever’s official career at Brussels we are indebted for several diplomatic portraits, notably those of Sir Horace Upton (The Fortunes of Glencore) and Sir Shally Doubleton (A Day’s Ride); the former of “a very composite order of human architecture, chivalrous in sentiment and cunning in action, noble in aspiration and utterly sceptical as regards motives, deep enough for a ministerial dinner and fast enough for a party of young guardsmen at Greenwich,” and the latter who could receive a Foreign Office “swell” thus: “Possibly your name may not be Paynter, sir; but you are evidently before me for the first time, or you would know that, like my great colleague and friend, Prince Metternich, I have made it a rule through life never to burden my memory with what can be spared it, and of these are the patronymics of all subordinate people; for this reason, sir, and to this end, every cook in my establishment answers to the name of Honoré, my valet is always Pierre, my coachman Jacob, and all Foreign Office messengers I call Paynter.” Upon the small-fry of diplomacy Mr. Lever is occasionally very severe, and his pictures of life at Hesse Kalbbratonstadt and similar unpronounceable principalities are as amusing as they are possibly realistic.
The success of Harry Lorrequer set its author at quill-driving in the same direction, and Charles O’Malley, or The Irish Dragoon, was given to the world. The very name sounds “boot and saddle”—rings of the spur and clanks of the sabre. What a romance: the high-spirited lad who leads his rival to the jaws of the grave in the hunting-field, and follows him in a ride of death against the unbroken front of Cambronne’s battalions on the blood-stained field of Waterloo! What a picture of the old Peninsular days! What portraits of Le petit Caporal, as the French army loved to call Napoleon, of the “Iron Duke,” the gallant Picton, and the great captains of that eventful period! What glimpses of dark-eyed señoritas and haughty hidalgos; of lion-hearted sons of Erin charging to the cry of Faugh a ballagh, and leading forlorn hopes with saucy jokes upon their laughing lips; of “Connaught Robbers,” as the Connaught Rangers were jocosely called, on account of the number of prisoners which they invariably made, and for the most part single-handed; of Brussels the night before Waterloo; and of the Duchess of Richmond’s celebrated ball:
“There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.”
What pictures of old Ireland—of Daly’s Club-House, the resort of the Irish members in College Green, still standing, but now converted into insurance offices. “I never pass the old club,” said Sir Thomas Staples, the last surviving member of the Irish House of Commons, to the writer, “without picturing it as I remember it, when Grattan, and Curran, and Ireland’s best blood strolled in after a fiery debate, or rushed out on the whisper of that awful word, ‘division.’ Very little would restore Daly’s to its original shape; and who knows but it may yet be revived, if repeal of the Union be carried?” Sir Thomas Staples is dead some years, and the Home-Rule question had not come to the front whilst he was yet numbered amongst the living. Shall we behold an Irish Parliament sitting once again in College Green? Shall Daly’s club be restored to its former splendor? Shall we see Mr. Butt, Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Mitchell Henry, with many other earnest sons of Ireland, enrolled amongst its members?
Who can forget the account of Godfrey O’Malley’s election, when, in order to avoid arrest for debt, he announced his own death in the papers, and, having travelled in the hearse to Connemara, reached his stronghold in the west, where bailiffs and process-servers foolhardy enough to cross the Shannon were compelled to eat their own writs under penalty of tar and feathers, and from whence he triumphantly addressed his constituents, appealing to their sympathies and support on the very powerful plea of having died for them? There is a story extant of Jackey Barrett which has not travelled far, if at all, beyond the walls of Trinity. Upon one occasion the vice-provost was dining off roast turkey in the glorious old Commons Hall, and next to him sat his nephew, the heir expectant to his enormous wealth. The turkey was somewhat underdone, and the nephew sent the drumsticks to be devilled. Some little delay occurred, which caused the vice-provost to observe to his kinsman with a malicious grin: “That devil is keeping you a long time waiting.” “Not half as long as you are keeping the devil waiting,” was the retort. Jackey never forgave him. What a creation is Mickey Free, that devoted, warm-hearted, rollicking Irish follower, that son of song and story, who, by his own account, sang duets with the commander-in-chief in the Peninsula, and wore a masterpiece of Murillo for a seat to his trousers! Mickey was quoted recently, during a debate in the British House of Commons on the Eastern question by Major O’Gorman, the jester-in-chief, vice Mr. Bernal Osborne, the rejected of Irish constituencies:
“For I haven’t a janius for work—
It was never a gift of the Bradies;
But I’d make a most illigant Turk,
For I’m fond of tobacco and ladies.”
The House roared, and even Mr. Disraeli, that was, allowed his parchment visage to snap into smiling. Charles Lever informed the writer that he originally intended Mickey Free for a mere stage servant, who comes on with a tray or exits with a chair or a table; but upon discovering that Mr. Free had made his mark he wrote him up. “I never could give a publisher a complete novel all at once,” said Mr. Lever, “although I have been offered very large sums of money for one; I always wait to see how my public like me, and write from month to month, trimming my sails to suit the popular breeze.”
Charles O’Malley was a brilliant success. A spirit of martial enthusiasm inflated the minds of the rising generation, until to be a dragoon became the day-dream of existence, and many an embryo warrior who failed in obtaining a commission compromised with a cruel destiny by accepting the queen’s shilling. The charm of the book is complete; and for break-neck, dashing narrative, for wit, sparkle, and genuine Irish drollery, interspersed here and there with tender touches of pathos and soft gray tones of sorrow, Charles O’Malley stands unrivalled, and will hold its own when hundreds of so-called Irish romances shall have returned to the dust out of which they should never have emerged, even into a spasmodic vitality.
Perhaps the only smart thing ever uttered by King George III. was when he taxed Sheridan with being afraid of the author of the School for Scandal; and perhaps Lever was afraid of the author of Charles O’Malley, as he published Con Cregan, Maurice Tiernay, Sir Jasper Carew, and one or two other novels anonymously; but a quickwitted public, detecting the ring of the true metal, compelled “Harry Lorrequer” to stand revealed. Novel followed novel in quick succession, Ireland providing the mine from which he dug his golden ore; and although he carries his readers to fairer climes and sunnier skies, somehow or other he contrives to land them safely and soundly in the “ould counthry” at last. We have not space, nor is it our province, to deal with Lever’s works in detail. No modern productions of fiction have gained a greater or more popular reputation for their writer. By no Irish author is he equalled in Irish humor, by no author is he surpassed in unwearying narrative. The foreign tone infused into some of his later productions is due to his residence in Italy. “You wish to have nothing to do, Lever? There is eight hundred a year; go and do it,” said the late Lord Derby, bestowing the vice-consulship of Spezzia upon him. Later on he was promoted to Trieste.
For a time Charles Lever edited the Dublin University Magazine, then a coruscation of all that was brilliant in literature. He resided at the village of Templeogue, situated in the lap of the Dublin mountains, with Sugar Loaf at one extremity, and Mount Pelier, with its ruined castle renowned for the orgies of the infamously-celebrated “Hell-fire Club,” at the other. Templeogue Lodge was the Mecca towards which all “choice spirits” devoutly turned, and the wit, repartee, song, jest, and story circulated within its walls made the Noctes Ambrosianæ but dull affairs in comparison. “One little room rises to recollection, with its quaint old sideboard of carved oak, its dark-brown cabinets, curiously sculptured, its heavy old brocade curtains, and all its queer devices of knick-knackery, where such meetings were once held, and where, throwing off the cares of life—shut out from them, as it were, by the massive folds of the heavy drapery across the door—we talked in all the fearless freedom of old friendship.” There are a few still surviving who will recognize that room, and recall with a throb of painful pleasure the nights at the little lodge at Templeogue.
Lever was fond of portraying banished heroes, misanthropes—men who had dug their own graves, or, overtaken by some whirlwind of misfortune, “gave signs that all was lost.” The character of Lord Glencore is admirably drawn, and his life of torture in his mad cry for vengeance fearfully vivid. Luttrell of Arran is the story of a disappointed life, from out of which springs a bright flower of maidenhood—Kate, one of Lever’s most charming creations. Again, we have the Knight of Gwynne, over whose gentle head wave after wave of hard fortune pitilessly breaks, and, driven from the lordly home of his ancestors to a sheeling by the sad sea-wave, he is as cheerful in adversity as he was noble in prosperity. The portrait of the fire-eating Bagenal Daly is not overdrawn, and the introduction of Freeny the robber, although highly melodramatic, is not only possible but probable. Freeny’s “character” stood remarkably high. He would rob a rich miser to save a poor family from starvation, and his word was as good as his bond; ‘98 turned many a man upon the king’s highway who, but for being “out,” would have lived respecting and respected. The Martins of Cro’ Martin is another ghastly narrative of the wreck and ruin of a proud old Irish race. It is “an owre true” story. A few miles outside of the town of Galway, on the road to Oughterard, stand two gaunt pillars surmounted by granite globes. The gates have disappeared, as also the armorial bearings; but this was formerly the entrance to Ballinahinch, the seat of the “ould, anshint” Martins, and from that gate to Ballinahinch Castle was a drive of forty Irish miles. The castle, situated in one of the loneliest and loveliest valleys in Connemara, was maintained in a style of regal magnificence, the stables, marble-stalled, affording accommodation for sixty hunters. On an island, in the centre of a small lake opposite the castle, stands a desolate, half-ruined keep, within the four walls of which such of his retainers or neighbors as proved refractory were imprisoned by “The Martin” of the period. Recklessness and improvidence scattered the broad acres, mortgage overlapped mortgage, and every inch of the grand old estate became the property of the London Law Life Assurance Society. Notably the last of the family was Richard Martin, commonly known as “Humanity Dick,” in reference to a bill introduced by him into the British House of Commons for the repression of cruelty to animals. Upon the occasion of its introduction the English members essayed to cough him down. “I perceive,” said Mr. Martin, “that many of you seem troubled with severe coughs; now, if any one gentleman will cough distinctly, so that I may be able to recognize him, I can give him a pill which may, perhaps, effectually prevent his ever being again troubled with a cough on this side of the grave.” Mr. Martin’s prescription was at once effectual.
With “Humanity Dick’s” granddaughter perished the race; and her name is still breathed in Connemara as a prayer, as one “who never opened a cabin-door without a blessing, nor closed it but to shut hope within.” The farm-house where she was nursed is still fondly pointed out, and “Miss Martin’s lep”—she was a superb horsewoman—is proudly shown to every “spalpeen” of an Englishman who travels that wild, bleak, and desolate road between Oughterard and Clifden. Mr. Lever, with that magic all his own, has told the sad story. His Mary Martin is but the portrait of that fair young Irish girl who dearly loved “her people” unto the last, and who, in the bright blossom of her life, died an exile from that western home which was at once her idol and her pride. Where but in Ireland could this sad and solemn gathering around the bedside of a dying girl take place?
“And yet there was a vast multitude of people there. The whole surface of the lawn that sloped from the cottage to the river was densely crowded with every age, from the oldest to the very infancy; with all conditions, from the well-clad peasant to the humblest ‘tramper’ of the highroads. Weariness, exhaustion, and even hunger were depicted on many of their faces. Some had passed the night there, others had come long distances, faint and foot-sore; but, as they sat, stood, or lay in groups around, not a murmur, not a whisper, escaped them. With aching eyes they looked towards an open window where the muslin curtains were gently stirred in the faint air. The tidings of Mary Martin’s illness had spread rapidly; far-away glens down the coast, lonely cabins on the bleak mountains, wild, remote spots out of human intercourse, had heard the news, and their dwellers had travelled many a mile to satisfy their aching hearts.”
This is Ireland. This is the undying affection of the people for the “rale ould stock.” This is the imperishable sentiment, as fresh at this hour as the emerald verdure upon the summit of Croagh Patrick.
In A Day’s Ride: a Life’s Romance, Mr. Lever has given us Algernon Sydney Potts—one of those romantic visionaries who believe in destiny, bow to their Kismet, and, going with the tide, clothe the meanest accidents of life in dreamy panoply. The adventures which befall the Dublin apothecary’s son, from his ride in Wicklow to his imprisonment in an Austrian fortress, are as varied as they are exciting, and we are strongly inclined to believe that Lever, “letting off” a good deal of Bohemia, is at his best in the wild vagaries of this reckless day-dreamer. Tom Burke of Ours is a dashing military story, as is also Jack Hinton, the Guardsman. The O’Donoghue is charmingly written and is thoroughly Irish. That Boy of Norcott’s is unsatisfactory. Commencing in Ireland, it wanders from the old country with the evident intention of returning to it; but a change came o’er the spirit of the author’s dream, and it bears all the imprint of having been hastily written, a changed venue, and of being “hurried up” at its conclusion. Sir Brook Fosbrooke, on the other hand, bears traces of the utmost care, the details of character being worked out with microscopic minuteness. The old lord chief-justice is supposed to have been meant for Lord Chief-Justice Lefroy, of the Court of Queen’s Bench in Ireland, who died at a very advanced age a few years since, in full possession of the astounding legal acumen which marked his extended career at the bar, and subsequently upon the bench.
The writer spent a long-to-be-remembered day with Charles Lever in the April before his death. He was stopping in Dublin at Morrison’s Hotel, Dawson Street. We found him seated at an open window, a bottle of claret at his right hand and the proof-sheets of Lord Kilgobbin before him. It was a beautiful morning borrowed from the month of May; the hawthorns in the college park were just beginning to bloom, and nature was young and warm and lovely.
At the date of our visit he looked a hale, hearty, laughter-loving man of sixty. There was mirth in his gray eye, joviality, in the wink that twittered on his eyelid, saucy humor in his smile, and bon mot, wit, repartee, and rejoinder in every movement of his lips. His hair very thin, but of a silky brown, fell across his forehead, and when it curtained his eyes he would jerk back his head—this, too, at some telling crisis in a narrative when the particular action was just the exact finish required to make the story perfect. Mr. Lever’s teeth were all his own, and very brilliant, and, whether from habit or accident, he flashed them upon us in company with his wonderful eyes—a battery at once both powerful and irresistible. He spoke slowly at first, but warming to his work, and candying an idea in a short, contagious, musical laugh, his story told itself all too rapidly, and the light burned out with such a glare as to intensify the succeeding darkness. Like all good raconteurs, he addressed himself deferentially to his auditor in the beginning, and as soon as the fish was hooked, the attention enthralled, he would speak as if thinking aloud. Mr. Lever made great use of his hands, which were small and white and delicate as those of a woman. He made play with them—threw them up in ecstasy or wrung them in mournfulness, just as the action of the moment demanded. He did not require eyes or teeth with such a voice and such hands; they could tell and illustrate the workings of his brain. He was somewhat careless in his dress, but clung to the traditional high shirt-collar, merely compromising the unswerving stock of the Brummel period. “I stick to my Irish shoes,” he said, thrusting upwards about as uncompromising a “bit of leather” as we have ever set eyes on right under our nose, “and until a few years ago I got them from a descendant of the celebrated Count Lally, who cobbled at Letterkenny. There is no shoe in the world equal to the Irish brogue.”
“You are ‘taking time by the forelock,’ as we say in the play,” said the writer, pointing to the rough copy of the Cornhill Magazine, in which the story was running.
“Always at the heel of the hunt,” he replied. “This is the May number, and not corrected yet.”
“I consider Lord Kilgobbin as good as, if not better than, anything you have written.”
There was unutterable sadness in his tone and gesture as he said, with a weary sigh:
“Ah! I have been tilting the cask so long that the lees are coming out very muddy.”
“Which of your novels do you like best?” was asked.
“Well, my most careful work is Sir Brook Fosbrooke, but I prefer the Dodd Family Abroad, and all for the sake of Carry Dodd, who is my ideal of a pure, bright, charming Irish girl.”
Further on:
“You are the same reckless, rollicking, warm-hearted, improvident people as when I left you, and the lower orders entertain the same hatred of Saxon supremacy. I was walking down College Green yesterday, and as I stood opposite the old Parliament House, a troop of dragoons, in all their panoply of glancing helmets, blood-red coats, and prancing steeds, trotted past. A ragged, tatterdemalion carman was feeding a horse only fit for the knacker’s yard, attached to an outside car, with a wisp of hay.
“‘What regiment is that?’ I asked, partly from curiosity, partly for the sake of a conversation.
“‘Sorra a know I know,’ was the gruff response.
“‘Where are they going to?’
“Without raising his head, and giving a vicious chuck to the hay:
“‘To h—l, I hope.’
“I will give you another illustration,” continued Mr. Lever, “of how determinedly the lower order of my countrymen disparage anything and everything English. I was invited to spend some days with the late Lord Carlisle, twice your Lord Lieutenant, at Castle Howard, in Yorkshire. I had at that time an Irish servant, a son of Corny Delany, to whom grumbling was chronic. As we drove through the magnificent avenue beneath the extending branches of giant oaks and lordly elms, I observed to my follower: ‘What do you think of those trees?’
“‘I see thim.’
“‘Are they not splendid?’
“‘Och! threes is threes anywhere.’
“‘But the Howards are proud of these trees; they are the finest in England. Lord Carlisle sets great store by them.’
“‘Arrah, thin, why wudn’t he have the hoighth av fine threes? Shure hadn’t he the pick av the Phaynix Park?’
“I was dining with Judge —— on Sunday, who, as you know, is a very diminutive, shrivelled-up-looking little man,” continued Mr. Lever, “and he told me an amusing story. When attorney-general, he purchased an estate in Tipperary near Clonmel. Shortly after the purchase he resolved upon paying the place a visit to take a look at his recent acquisition. As he was proceeding with his agent through a boreen which led to mearings of his property, he overheard the following conversation between two old women:
“‘Wisha, thin, d’ye tell me that’s the new landlord, Missis Mulligan?’
“‘Sorra a lie in it, ma’am.’
“‘That dawny little bit av a crayture?’
“‘A leprechaun, no less.’
“‘Why, begorra, the boys might as well be shootin’ at a jacksnipe.’”
Mr. Lever’s conversational powers were simply marvellous; his anecdotes fell like ripe fruit from an overladen tree. In London his great delight was a night at the Cosmopolitan Club, Berkeley Square. This club is only open upon Wednesday and Sunday nights during the Parliamentary session. The members stroll in from eleven o’clock at night to about three o’clock A.M. Cabinet ministers, ambassadors of all nations, members of the legislature, eminent littérateurs, Royal Academicians, repair thither for a gossip; and here, amidst the best talkers in the world, Charles Lever stood pre-eminent. As the wits and raconteurs at Will’s Coffee House were silent whilst Joseph Addison talked Spectator, so the members of the Cosmopolitan maintained a breathless attention when Charles Lever talked Cornelius O’Dowd; and many a man has “dined out considerably” upon a mot, and has, perhaps, established a reputation, by the retailing of an anecdote recounted within the salons of the club by the inimitable and fascinating “Harry Lorrequer.” When the writer parted with Lever upon that evening, he felt justifiably elated at being enabled to amuse, if not astonish, the most brilliant man of the day, but, upon a rigid self-examination, was somewhat disappointed upon discovering that, instead of his having been engaged in entertaining Lever, Lever had been entertaining him, and that he had not uttered a single sentence out of the veriest commonplace. Such was the charm of Lever’s manner that he took you, as it were, from out yourself, and for the time infused his own groove of thought, causing your ideas to mingle with his and float joyously onward upon the glittering current of his conversation. Lever was a devoted worshipper of the “sad solemnities of whist,” playing rubber after rubber up to any and all hours. It is related that an eminent wearer of the ermine, a fellow of Trinity College, a gallant field officer, and Lever met, dined early, and played whist until the hour at which the train departed for Kingston by which “Harry Lorrequer” was to leave en route for London. “Come on to Kingston,” said Lever, “sleep at the Anglesea Arms Hotel, and I will not go until the morning boat.” They played all night and until one o’clock next day. Si non e vero e ben trovato, but the writer has the story from unimpeachable authority.
Charles Lever’s last novel, concluded shortly before his death, is Lord Kilgobbin. Let its unutterably sad preface speak for itself:
“To the memory of one whose companionship made the happiness of a long life, and whose loss has made me helpless, I dedicate this book, written in breaking health and broken spirits. The task that once was my joy and my pride I have lived to find associated with my sorrow. It is not, then, without a cause I say, I hope this effort may be my last.—Trieste, January 20, 1872.”
It is with a pang of regret that we peruse the Cornelius O’Dowd papers. They are tinged with that abominable spirit which is sending Italy at the present hour to perdition, and we greatly fear that Mr. Lever wrote them for the London market. He was no bigot, however; on the contrary, his life was passed amongst Catholics, and his dearest and best friends were of the true church; consequently, the pain is intensified when we come to stand face to face with the fact that these papers were, if not the outcome of a pecuniary necessity, at least the result of a craving for money, and the hollow effusions of a hirelingpen. His Italian sojourn led him gradually away from the more kindly tone towards Catholics which pervaded his earlier Irish novels.
Lever and Griffin have been compared as writers of Irish fiction. We would rather have been the author of The Collegians than of any work of Mr. Lever’s. There is a virgin simplicity in Gerald Griffin’s style that “Harry Lorrequer” could not touch; an atmosphere which he could not breathe; a purity which, while the morale of Lever’s writings is unimpeachable, is of that order that is so rarely attained by the most chaste and most elevated amongst our writers of fiction. Griffin’s Irish is not stagy—it is real; so, too, is Lever’s. But while the former paints the portrait, leaving the imagination of the reader to put in the finishing touches, the latter rubs in a laugh here or a keen thrust there, so as to dramatize the picture; and, while it is more vivid during perusal, the mind falls back upon the other for less exciting pabulum.