CHALLENGED BY MONSOON'S SON.

II

suppose it answered your purpose just as well as any other.'

"Just so. I only wanted dates and names. As to you, I perceive that you are only fit to write heavy articles. You are one of those, I take it, who can or will write only about what they profess to understand-not a very profitable métier, I can assure you; but one unpleasantness at least you will thereby escape, namely, the ire of individuals whose vanity or self-complacency has been wounded. Just fancy, old Monsoon's son went over to Brussels, when I was there, for the express purpose of shooting me, in duello of course, for having exaggerated too grossly, as he thought, the gallant major's sentiments on a variety of delicate subjects. The best of it was, that after a few days séjour in the paternal mansion, the son was obliged to confess that I had rather underdrawn than the contrary, and so I was permitted to live a little longer. Come along it is now time for us to go aboard the convict ship; the boat is, as you see, waiting for us at the jetty.""

In "Tom Burke" he utilised the material he had already collected when following the campaigns of the Consulate and the Empire. Hayman remarked to him "that he believed he was the only one who cared for Napoleon and his times in this age of the world." Louis Philippe was then in the zenith of his power, and the prestige of the Bourbons seemed at its height; yet Lever quite anticipated the Napoleonic revival which set in so strongly ten years later. He visited France in

1843, but was not dazzled by the gorgeous glare of Louis Philippe, who "was as much king as was Napoleon, and as much as Louis XIV. himself, and ruled Guizot, who ruled the Chamber." A man writing for the market would perhaps not have opened the tale in Ireland, but Lever, true son of the soil as he was, found old memories flooding in upon him so powerfully that he could not cast them off. He laboured, as he tells us, to imbue his hero so intensely with the traits of his own land, to mark him out so distinctly Irish before launching him among Frenchmen, that he would have a place in the reader's mind, and be able to attach to himself an interest quite different from that of any other character in the story.

In France he found a fertile field. The first Napoleon is graphically sketched, both by author and artist in this book. Some stirring incidents of French life are freely dashed off, and even the Irish anecdotes, which at first seem so racy of the soil, are as redolent of cogniac as of poteen. The knight's colloquy with the Irish tenant, who earns his rents by acting the part of a wild Indian at the Egyptian Hall in London, is irresistibly droll, but is quite as much the property of France as of Ireland, the same story being told, though much less effectively, by Paul de Kock, who makes the hero a Frenchman, and Paris the theatre of exhibition. This, no doubt, is a coincidence rather than a plagiarism on either side, a great affinity and sympathy between the French and Irish notoriously existing. The present Knight of Kerry, addressing us, says that the story told by Lever

AN IMPOSTURE EXPOSED.

13

of his father and the Irishman passing himself off as a wild Indian is in the main authentic. When, in the showroom, he had given forth his gibberish, the Knight menacingly taxed him with being a native of Iveragh; the man, overawed by the suddenness of the reproach coming from one who, from his boyhood, he had been taught to revere, confessed his duplicity, and besought the knight not to expose him.* Whether Paul de Kock cribbed this from Lever, or accidentally hit upon the same idea, is doubtful. The French and Irish possess an equally prompt perception of the ludicrous. The incidents of some of Boucicault's best plays are borrowed from our Gallic friends. That richly Hibernian farce, "The Irish Tutor," in which Tyrone Power so often delighted audiences as Doctor O'Toole, is an adaptation from the French by Lord Glengall. The same remark applies to "The Quiet Rubber," in which Mr. Hare so ably personates the part of the Irish peer, Lord Kilcare. Few would regard Micky Free as Frenchy, and yet Lever once said of him :

"He is not an exaggeration, simply because nothing can exaggerate the versatile drollery of a people who, with the raciest turn for humour, combine the sharpwitted flippancy of a polished Frenchman. Never nonplussed for an expedient, never pushed for a rejoinder, like their native horses they are always well back on their haunches, and ready for a spring."

Letter of the Knight of Kerry, 8th March, 1876.

From the Irish peasant to the Irish squire, as presented by Lever, a sort of French varnish overspreads both. Regarding Kenny Dodd-perhaps the best of his characters-a critic said, "Montaigne would have chosen him for a companion. Molière would have sympathised with and loved him."

Lever was very anxious to secure the pencil of Tony Johannot for "Tom Burke," feeling that his pictures of Frenchmen would be more graphic than those of Phiz; while his name, like French vinegar, would give a piquancy to the whole. It was, we think, Dr. Maginn who remarked that "Lorrequer," "O'Malley," and “Tom Burke,” with their powerfully individualized "I,” resembled the "Gil Blas" of Le Sage, while the bright wit of all reminds us of Beaumarchais' "Figaro," in which sentence after sentence blazes forth and bangs like a discharge of fireworks.

"If," observes Major D-, who from boyhood to age carefully studied the mind of Lever, and acquired a deep knowledge of the German character by long residence, "if he had been a Celtic Irishman, Gallic sympathies, excellences and defects, would have been quite natural, but Lever was an Anglo-Saxon by race. What is there in the fickle and everchanging climate of Ireland that makes those subjected to its influence Frenchy, and renders them indisposed to the severe and patient labour of the Saxon? Truly, this is wonderful; and I have always regretted, for his sake, that Lever did not in his youth spend more than one winter in Germany."

TRIP TO PARIS.

15

Lever's bias on returning to Ireland was thoroughly German. Tired at last of the Burschenschaft, he became very Irish, and more and more French in his sympathies. His style, with its brilliant dialogue and cutting repartee, was decidedly French, and founded on French models, whilst it must be allowed that its greatest faults, want of accuracy and frequent anachronism, are equally French. A favourite occupation of his at this time, "Nuts and Nutcrackers," were modelled on the "Guêpes" of Alphonse Karr.

A trip to Paris in April, 1843, made him still more Gallic, and furnished ample gossip for the delectation of fireside friends, on his return. His main object in going was to impart an extra French polish to the marvellously progressive boots of "Tom Burke."

Finding the Boulogne boat full-no one having courage to cross via Calais, whose "paquebot à vapeur," had long been condemned-he needs must make use of the latter, and after a severe passage, characterised by much screaming and sea-sickness, reached the Goodwin Sands. The boat "manned by rats," is described as being, happily, too rotten to sink. By high pay and civil speeches he secured a suite of rooms in the Hôtel Wagram overlooking the Tuileries. All he saw greatly elated him, and proved a fine relaxation after his editorial worries and fagging journey.

Lever left Ireland in a snowstorm, with sleet flying through a leaden sky-no sun above, and dark mud below

-to reach Paris, where all the trees in the Tuileries