Though you, my youthful reader, if I have one, do not detest Jones because he is in the Eleven, nor Brown because he has "got his cap,"nor Smith because he does Greek Iambics like Sophocles; though you rather admire and applaud these champions, you may feel very differently when you come to thirty years or more, and see other men doing what you cannot do, and gaining prizes beyond your grasp. And then, if you are a reviewer, you "will find fault with a book for what it does not give," as thus, to take Mr. Thackeray's example:-"Lady Smigsmag's novel is amusing, but lamentably deficient in geological information." "Mr. Lever's novels are trashy and worthless, for his facts are not borne out by any authority, and he gives us no information about the political state of Ireland. 'Oh!
our country, our green and beloved, our beautiful and oppressed?'"and so forth.
It was not altogether a happy time that Lever passed at home. Not only did his native critics belabour him most ungrudgingly for "Tom Burke," that vivid and chivalrous romance, but he made enemies of authors. He edited a magazine! Is not that enough? He wearied of wading through waggon-loads of that pure unmitigated rubbish which people are permitted to "shoot" at editorial doors. How much dust there is in it to how few pearls! He did not return MSS. punctually and politely. The office cat could edit the volunteered contributions of many a magazine, but Lever was even more casual and careless than an experienced office cat. He grew crabbed, and tried to quarrel with Mr. Thackeray for that delightful parody "Phil Fogarty," nearly as good as a genuine story by Lever.
Beset by critics, burlesqued by his friend, he changed his style (Mr. Fitzpatrick tells us) and became more sober--and not so entertaining. He actually published a criticism of Beyle, of Stendhal, that psychological prig, the darling of culture and of M.
Paul Bourget. Harry Lorrequer on Stendhal!--it beggars belief. He nearly fought a duel with the gentleman who is said to have suggested Mr. Pecksniff to Dickens! Yet they call his early novels improbable. Nothing could be less plausible than a combat between Harry Lorrequer and a gentleman who, even remotely, resembled the father of Cherry and Merry.
Lever went abroad again, and in Florence or the Baths of Lucca, in Trieste or Spezia, he passed the rest of his life. He saw the Italian revolution of 1848, and it added to his melancholy. This is plain from one of his novels with a curious history--"Con Cregan."He wrote it at the same time as "The Daltons," and he did not sign it. The reviewers praised "Con Cregan" at the expense of the signed work, rejoicing that Lever, as "The Daltons" proved, was exhausted, and that a new Irish author, the author of "Con Cregan," was coming to eclipse him. In short, he eclipsed himself, and he did not like it. His right hand was jealous of what his left hand did. It seems odd that any human being, however dull and envious, failed to detect Lever in the rapid and vivacious adventures of his Irish "Gil Blas,"hero of one of the very best among his books, a piece not unworthy of Dumas. "Con" was written after midnight, "The Daltons" in the morning; and there can be no doubt which set of hours was more favourable to Lever's genius. Of course he liked "The Daltons"best; of all people, authors appear to be their own worst critics.
It is not possible even to catalogue Lever's later books here.
Again he drove a pair of novels abreast--"The Dodds" and "Sir Jasper Carew"--which contain some of his most powerful situations. When almost an old man, sad, outworn in body, straitened in circumstances, he still produced excellent tales in this later manner--"Lord Kilgobbin," "That Boy of Norcott's," "A Day's Ride,"and many more. These are the thoughts of a tired man of the world, who has done and seen everything that such men see and do. He says that he grew fat, and bald, and grave; he wrote for the grave and the bald, not for the happier world which is young, and curly, and merry. He died at last, it is said, in his sleep; and it is added that he did what Harry Lorrequer would not have done--he left his affairs in perfect order.
Lever lived in an age so full of great novelists that, perhaps, he is not prized as he should be. Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, were his contemporaries. But when we turn back and read him once more, we see that Lever, too, was a worthy member of that famous company--a romancer for boys and men.
THE POEMS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
Yesterday, as the sun was very bright, and there was no wind, I took a fishing-rod on chance and Scott's poems, and rowed into the middle of St. Mary's Loch. Every hill, every tuft of heather was reflected in the lake, as in a silver mirror. There was no sound but the lapping of the water against the boat, the cry of the blackcock from the hill, and the pleasant plash of a trout rising here and there.
So I read "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" over again, here, in the middle of the scenes where the story is laid and where the fights were fought. For when the Baron went on pilgrimage, "And took with him this elvish page To Mary's Chapel of the Lowes,"it was to the ruined chapel HERE that he came, "For there, beside our Ladye's lake, An offering he had sworn to make, And he would pay his vows."But his enemy, the Lady of Branksome, gathered a band, "Of the best that would ride at her command,"and they all came from the country round. Branksome, where the lady lived, is twenty miles off, towards the south, across the ranges of lonely green hills. Harden, where her ally, Wat of Harden, abode, is within twelve miles; and Deloraine, where William dwelt, is nearer still; and John of Thirlestane had his square tower in the heather, "where victual never grew," on Ettrick Water, within ten miles. These gentlemen, and their kinsfolk and retainers, being at feud with the Kers, tried to slay the Baron, in the Chapel of "Lone St. Mary of the Waves.""They were three hundred spears and three.
