HIS LOVE OF CHANGE.

ΙΟΙ

and tending to remind one of an apophthegm of Talleyrand's: "Mr. Puff,' "Mr. Puff," he writes, "expresses his dismay 'that there is no getting people off their knees;' such is precisely my difficulty at this moment. I am about to take leave of you; and most anxious to know how best and most suitably to express the sense I entertain of your favour, and my own unworthiness." He declined to state the reasons which led to this step, but declared that amongst them was no diminished interest in the Magazine, or any disagreement with its publishers.

He dearly loved change of scene and place. His sudden decision to leave Dublin must be interpreted more generously than some of his expressions seem to warrant. He could not continue to write if he did not meet with adventure; all his books are stored with the ripe fruit of personal observation. He said that the pawn on the chessboard has a most eventful life, simply because its progress is slow, methodical, and unchangeable; but not so the knight, who with the errantry of his race, dashes here and there, encountering every rank, always in difficulties himself, or the cause of them to others. "What the knight is to the chessboard, the adventure is to real life. The same wayward fortune and zig-zag course belongs to each, and each is sure to have a share in every great event that occurs about him." If Lever could not write without a store of past personal adventure to draw upon, neither could he live without partaking of its elixir. The seclusion of Templeogue, at first delightful, became at last dull and dreadfully monotonous.

McGlashan, in fact, chose it for Lever because of its somewhat inaccessible position to visitors. The publisher supposed that it would afford facilities for an inexhaustible flow of composition; but he latterly found that, owing to dearth of fuel, the machinery sometimes showed symptoms of stopping."

"You rightly tell of his anxiety about critical notices," writes Canon Hayman, "which customarily either stimulated or saddened. He writhed under one criticism on the D. U. M., i.e., that he had found it the 'Blackwood' of Ireland, and had made it the 'Bentley.' But in unsettling him there were more causes than reviews of his works. He did not take well to our manners. He abhorred our way of entertaining friends. Often he has said to me, 'Eating is the chief end of entertainments with our people. If I were with the French I should only light my rooms well, provide some coffee and light refreshments, and have charming evenings.' The expense he did not care for, but he missed the spirituel, and he sickened at the animal nature of our insular entertainments. Nor do I wonder. A sojourn on the continent opens a new world to us, who dwell in these isles. The skies, the rivers, the mountains, the plains,

* Inaccessible as Templeogue was, Lever complained to Hayman that from the number of queer people who called, they seemed to regard him as a sort of general agent for vagabonds at home and abroad. A young scribe asked for introductions to the continent, as he was going away for two months to learn German and French. "I hope you do not forget," replied Lever," that Cervantes, Alfieri and Tasso, had languages of their own also. I took eight months to be able to read Jean Paul Richter, and I should at least take four more now to bring back the power to do so."

AN OUTBurst of GENIUS.

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the people, so entwine themselves around the affection, that it is difficult to love our own old murky climate again. Lever became like others, cosmopolitan in his feelings; and could not tolerate our narrowness and angularities. I am far from saying that he was made happier or better by the change. There were seasons when he longed for the obscurity and usefulness of a dispensary doctor's life, and would say "Non malè vixit, qui natus moriensque fefellit."

"When just on the wing," writes his cousin, Mr. Innes, "he made the remark, 'Dublin people say I am about to take French leave, my creditors having lost patience with me, and that my resemblance to Sir Jonahı Barrington would be made perfect, by winding it up with a midnight flitting like his. The plain truth is I came to Dublin so poor a man, that I cannot be much poorer leaving it, but no one suffers by my poverty, but me, and mine.'

An outburst of effulgent talent shone forth in Ireland between the years '43 and '50, which, it may not be too much to say, took fire from Lever's genius, though the torches thus enkindled led to different routes. During that interval blazed Lefanu, Davis, Mangan, Mitchel, Meagher, Speranza, Wilde, McCarthy, O'Hagan, Duffy, O'Callaghan, Darcy-MacGee, MacNevin, Dalton Williams, O'Gorman, Leyne, A. M. Sullivan, Hoey, Waller, Starkey, and M. J. Barry, whom Lever regularly took under his editorial wing. Latterly there has been somewhat of a pause in the bright pomp of this march of mind.

CHAPTER IV.

Off to the Continent-Lever as a Journalist-Excites a sensation at Carlsruhe-Loss at the Baden tables-Collapse of a projected Novel-Rents the Reider-Schloss-"The Knight of Gwynne "-Phiz-Como-Venice -Rome-His papers seized by the Austrian authorities.

SOME cerebral stings had warned Lever that change of scene was needed. "What would poor Scott have given," writes Dickens, "to have gone abroad of his own free will, a young man, instead of creeping there, a driveller, in his miserable decay?"

"In the spring of 1845," continues his amanuensis, Mr. Stephen Pearce, "Lever determined to leave Ireland and go on the continent; and in May of that year we had all arrived at Brussels, where his old friend Sir Hamilton Seymour was still the English minister. After some considerable stay at Brussels, with parties at the Embassy, visits to the Picture Galleries, Lacken, and the Field of Waterloo, we most pleasantly travelled onwards through Belgium to the Rhine, and settled for a time at Bonn. I ought to mention that Lever took over his horses and carriages to the continent, and made use of them, not only for the purpose of travelling from place to place, but also for riding and driving in and about the residences where he located himself for a time.

PRINCE ALBERT.

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"At Bonn we saw, I well remember, on a lovely summer's day, three student duels with the sword in a picturesque wood a few miles away—I having obtained private information from Alexis von Wolff, a young Russian friend, whose acquaintance I had made there. The royal consort of England was then a great lion, and Lever gathered with interest particulars of his career at Bonn, how he had lived in the most quiet, simple, and frugal way, and how his uncle, the late King of the Belgians, struck by his steadiness, selected him in his own mind as the future husband of our queen. From Bonn we went to Baden-Baden, where Lever was in a most excited state about gambling, and where he got hit hard. He then took a house at Carlsruhe, where his old friends G. P. R. James the novelist and Major Dresided. The latter had been an old companion of his in Ireland many years previous, and had latterly been in the Hungarian Hussars of the Austrian service. We were for several evenings visited by the Marquis of Douro, who amused and interested us all very much with anecdotes of his father, the great Duke."

But Mr. Pearce anticipates.

Confidential whispers to O'Sullivan and others find Lever in the spring of 1845 wading through the last £50 he had in the world; but if his trip had made him poor, it had bettered his health: he had grown much thinner, and the headaches had disappeared.

To help in eking out a livelihood, he had not even the chance of medical fees to look to. The relinquished rod