“‘The Times’ on ‘Tony’ was miserable: the book is—‘though I that oughtn’t,’ &c,—good. That is, there is a devilish deal more good in it than half of the things that are puffed up into celebrity, and had it been written by any man but my unlucky self, would have had great success. I have not seen the M. P. notice. I have just seen the ‘P. Mall Gazette.’ It is deplorably bad: the attempts at fun and smartness positively painful. I am impatient to hear what you say of the new story.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morelli, Feb. 21,1865.
“I hasten to answer your note, which has just come and relieved me of some gloomy apprehensions. I had begun to fancy that your delay in pronouncing on B. F. is out of dislike to say that you are not pleased with it. This fear of mine was increased by being low and depressed. Your judgment has relieved me, however, and done me much good already, and to-morrow I’ll go to work ‘with a will’ and, I hope, a ‘way.’
“‘The Judge and his Wife’ * are life sketches, the rest are fictional.
* Baron Lendrick (in ‘Sir Brook Fossbrooke’) was one of
Lever’s favourite characters. The old judge was a sketch for
which he had to depend upon a memory of a journey made more
than twenty years before ‘Sir Brook’ was written. Lever had
travelled to London in the ‘Forties with a distinguished
party—Isaac Butt, Frederick Shaw (the member for Dublin
University), Henry West (afterwards a judge), and Sergeant
Lefroy (afterwards—Lord Chief-Justice of Ireland). Baron
Lendrick was a study of Lefroy. It was said that Lever was
the only man who had ever succeeded in making Lefroy laugh.
Lever declared that his Baron Lendrick was a portrait upon
which he had expended “a good deal of time and paint”—E. D.
“I send you a batch of O’Ds. for April No. Some of them I think good. By the way, Smith—of Smith & Elder—has been begging me to send him something, as O’Ds. I refused, and said that Cornelius was your property, and if I sent him an occasional squib it should be on no account under that title.
“From what I have seen I agree with you about the style and pretensions of the ‘P. M. Gazette.’ They are heavy when trying to be light and volatile, the dreariest sort of failure imaginable. It is strange fact that what the world regards as the inferior organisation—the temperament for drollery—is infinitely the most difficult to imitate. Your clown might possibly play Hamlet. I’ll be shot if Hamlet could play Clown! Now original matter on daily events, to be read at all, ought to have the stamp of originality on its style. These fellows have not caught this. They are as tiresome as real members of Parliament.
“There is a great dearth of ‘passing topics’ for O’Dowderie; Parliament is dull, and society duller. I am sure that a little stupidity—a sort of prosy platitude just now in O’D.—would conciliate my critics of the press. My pickles have given them a heartburn, d——— them; but they shall have them hotter than ever.”
To Mr John Blackwood.