LEVER
How He Lived.
The story of Lever’s life and adventures only wants telling to be as irresistibly attractive as Lorrequer’s or O’Malley’s own. Born in Dublin, of an English father and an Irish mother, he lived to be essentially cosmopolitan and a viveur of the first magnitude. At eight he was master of his schoolmaster—a gentleman given to flogging but not learned in Greek, and therefore a proper subject for a certain sort of blackmailing. He was not an industrious boy; but he was apt and ready with his tongue, he was an expert in fencing and the dance, he was good at improvising and telling stories, it is on record that he pleaded and won the cause of himself and certain of his schoolmates accused before a magistrate of riot and outrage. At college he found work for his high spirits in wild fun and the perpetration of practical jokes. He and his chum Ottiwell, the original of Frank Webber, behaved to their governors, teachers, and companions very much as Charles O’Malley and the redoubtable Frank behave to theirs. Lever was excellent at a street-ballad, and made and sang them in the rags of Rhoudlim, just
as Frank Webber does; and he personated Cusack the surgeon to Cusack’s class, just as Frank Webber personates the dean to his class. On the whole, indeed, he must have been as gamesome and volatile a nuisance as even Dublin has endured. On leaving college he took charge of an emigrant ship bound for Quebec. Arrived in Canada, he plunged into the backwoods, was affiliated to a tribe of Indians, and had to escape like Bagenal Daly at the risk of his life. Then he went to Germany, became a student at Göttingen under Blumenbach, was heart and soul a Bursch, and had the honour of seeing Goethe at Weimar. His diploma gained, he went to Clare to do battle with the cholera and gather materials for Harry Lorrequer. After this he was for some time dispensary doctor at Portstewart, where he met Prebendary Maxwell, the wild parson who wrote Captain Blake: so that here and now it is natural to find him leaping turf-carts and running away from his creditors. At Brussels, where he physicked the British Embassy and the British tourist, he knew all sorts of people—among them Commissioner Meade, the original of Major Monsoon, and Cardinal Pecci, the original of Leo xiii.—and saw all sorts of life, and ran into all sorts of extravagance: until of a sudden, he is back again in the capital, editing the Dublin University Magazine. Of course he was the maddest editor
ever seen. For him cards, horses, and high living were not luxuries but necessaries of life; yet all the while he believed devoutly in medicine, and with his family indulged with freedom in the use of calomel and such agents. Presently he abandoned Ireland for the Continent. He took his horses with him, and astonished Europe with a four-in-hand of his own. Carlsruhe knew him well, as Belgium and the Rhine had known him. He only left the Reider Schloss at Bregenz to conquer Italy; and at Florence, Spezzia, and finally Trieste, he shone like himself.
What He Was.
He was a born poseur. His vanity made him one of the worst—the most excessive—of talkers; go where he would and do what he might, he was unhappy if the first place were another’s. In all he did he was greedy to excel, and to excel incontestably. Like his own Bagenal Daly he would have taken the big jump with the reins in his mouth and his hands tied, ‘just to show the English Lord-Lieutenant how an Irish gentleman rides.’ He was all his life long confounding an English Lord-Lieutenant of some sort; for without display he would have pined away and died. At Templeogue
he lived at the rate of £3,000 a year on an income of £1,200; at Brussels he kept open house on little or nothing for all the wandering grandees of Europe; at Florence they used to liken the cavalcade from his house to a procession from Franconi’s; he found living in a castle and spending £10 a day on his horses the finest fun in the world. He existed but to bewilder and dazzle, and had he not been a brilliant and distinguished novelist he would have been a brilliant and distinguished something else. As he kept open house everywhere, as he was fond of every sort of luxury, as he loved not less to lend money to his intimates than to lose it to them at cards, and as he got but poor prices for his novels and was not well paid for his consular services, it is not easy to see how he managed to make ends meet.
How He Wrote.
Nor is it easy to see how he contrived to produce his novels. He was too passionately addicted to society and the enjoyment of life to spare an instant from them if he could help it; and the wonder is not that he should have written so well but that he should have written at all. Fortunately or the other thing, his books cost him no effort.