“As to his [M’Glashan’s] codicil. He knows me by this time well enough to be aware that if he but gives me the wind of a word, I am always ready to pull up short; and if the story should not be found to tell with his readers, I’ll make a short yarn of it willingly. Only I beg that I may not be asked to spoil a catastrophe by any abruptness, but get fair notice to shorten sail....
“With ‘Tiernay’ I may be able to work along in these hard times, when, besides my confoundedly wasteful habits, education—or what affects to be education—for the brats runs away with every sixpence I can make.
“I have said nothing about [using] my name in the M’Glashan compact, because as he does not in the Magazine append other names, he will not of course do so with mine. But in any other way I have no desire to blink the authorship, intending, as I do, to make the story as interesting as I am able.
“In another six weeks we shall be in the mountains,—in our old delightful quarters at the Bagni di Lucca,—where cheapness and glorious scenery are happy associates.
“I have not heard more of the notices of my book in ‘The Dublin University Magazine,’ and now that a new contribution of mine will appear there, it would be too late, and look too like a puff, to print a critique on me in the same sheet with myself. Tell M’Glashan that however anxious [? I may be] for a review, I’d rather forgo it now than incur such a malapropos.
“I have repeated assurances sent special to me of the high estimate of my books entertained by the directors of ‘The Quarterly,’ but from some underhand proceeding—some secret influence of whose machinery I can obtain no information—they never have noticed me publicly. I have been given to understand that the Dickens and Thackeray cliques have conspired to this end. Of course I have never hinted this to any one, nor shown any feeling on the subject, but the injury is considerable even in a pecuniary point.
“You would scarcely believe how much I have sacrificed in not being a regular member of the Guild of Letters,—dining at the Athenaeum, getting drunk at The Garrick, supping with ‘Punch,’ and steaming down to a Whitebait feed at Blackwall with reporters, reviewers, and the other [? acolytes] of the daily press. This you will say is no such fascinating society. Very true; but it pays—or, what is worse, nothing else will pay. The ‘Pressgang’ take care that no man shall have success independent of them. Or if he do—gare à lui—let him look to himself!
“I am now cudgelling my brains about a new story for Chapman, to be called ‘The Daltons, or, Three Roads in Life,’ in which I have attempted—God knows with what chance of success!—the quiet homely narrative style of German romance-writers. I shall be very anxious to know what you will think of it, and you shall see the first No. as soon as it is printed.
“Scott says that to write well you must write unceasingly, and that the well of imagination does not go dry from exhaustion but from want of pumping. Mine is not likely to fail if I only intend to keep bread in our mouths.”
The circle of Anglo-Florentine society was widened in 1850 by the advent of Richard Lalor Shiel,* who came to Florence as British Minister. In Ireland Lever and Shiel had been bitterly opposed to each other, but meeting in a foreign city, their political animosities were forgotten, and they fraternised as Irish exiles and Irish humourists. Lever enjoyed wit as keenly as whist; and he declared that Shiel had lost none of his wit by being transplanted, and that he could make a bon mot in French with as much readiness and grace as he could make one in English. Shiel, unfortunately, had a short tenure of office in Florence. He died suddenly in 1851.