Good bye! they say the time is up—
The “solitary horseman” leaves us,
We’d like to take a “stirrup cup”,
Though much indeed the parting grieves us:
We’d like to hear the glasses clink
Around a board where none was tipsy,
And with a hearty greeting drink
This toast—The Author of the Gipsey!
The same Major Dwyer relates at some length the conversations of the guests at Lever’s home in Ireland. Speaking of a visit of Thackeray about 1842, he says: “James had been living at Brussels previously, and an intimacy had sprung up between Lever and him. Thackeray’s star was then barely peeping over the eastern horizon; Lever’s had attained an altitude that rendered it clearly visible to the uncharmed eye, whilst James’s had already passed its point of culmination, and was in its descending node.” I do not know what the eloquent Major meant by an “uncharmed eye,” but his figures of speech are quite luxuriant. He does not think that Thackeray and James met at Lever’s house, but he tells of a dinner there, where a Captain Siborne, Doctor Anster, and the Major were asked to meet James. It appears that after dinner, James took a very decided lead in the conversation on horsemanship and military tactics. “James” remarks the Major, “was not horsey looking; one would at first sight be inclined to set him down as an exception to the general rule, that ‘all Britons are born riders’; he looked more like a seaman than a soldier.” This is deliciously fatuous—as if a man could not talk well about horses unless he had a horsey look or drive fat oxen unless he himself were fat. It is like the Mitchell prattle about his having no scar and wearing no doublet. In talking about horses and riders, James evidently did not foresee that in the future his name would be so closely associated with “one horseman” or even two, threading romantic gorges. Perhaps it would have been better for his fame, if he had eschewed horsemen. “Why,” continues the Major, “he should have selected two such topics puzzled both Siborne and myself, but I subsequently found that James liked to seize upon and talk categorically about things which other individuals of the company present might be suspected of considering their own peculiar hobbies.” This device for enlivening post-prandial dullness by stirring up solemn and conceited prigs is quite familiar, but it does not seem to have occurred to the Major that the clever novelist was making game of the two military magnates. He tells us further how Siborne declined “to discuss professional matters with a civilian,” and closes his pompous and heavy remarks with this gem of concentrated wisdom: “James, so fond of horseflesh, finished his career as Consul General at Venice where the sight of a horse is never seen.” I suppose that the Major would have considered it more fitting if James had selected some place to die in where ‘the sight of a horse could be seen’ at all times by merely looking out of the window. It is not difficult to imagine the joy with which the nimble-minded James put through their paces the heavy-witted and cumbrous Captain and Major at the pleasant dinner-table of Charles Lever. It reminds me of an occasion when a sincere and simple-minded Briton undertook to engage in single combat with Mark Twain over a statement thrown out by the equally sincere and simple-minded Clemens that the people of the Phillipine Islands had a perfect right to make arson and murder lawful if they considered it proper to incorporate in their constitution a provision to that effect. His powerful arguments did not produce the slightest change in the convictions of Mr. Clemens.
However severely the sapient compilers of Chambers’ Cyclopædia or the critics of our own generation may sneer at the novels—the fiction of the twentieth century being in the estimation of our contemporaries so vastly superior to all that has gone before—it is something to have had the approval of Christopher North, who was not given to bestowing lavish commendation upon the work of mere Englishmen. If you will take from the shelves the Noctes Ambrosianæ, you will find these words: