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that he was his own advocate. He was conscious in his own heart of better aims and objects than it is the habit. to give him credit for. The attempt must be a weak one which has not been appreciated, and the time would yet come when it shall be. In either case he would not be the sign-post to himself. Like old Woodcock in the play, his cry was "No money till I die." When that happened some one would be found to say whatever ought to be said of him, without the pain of hurting him, or the risk of exciting animadversions from less generous critics. He made no choice, and was ready to take his chance!

His plan in "Maurice Tierney" was to follow the great political changes that have darkened or enlightened the map of Europe, from the great French Revolution of '92 down to the little ones of '48 or '49; making his hero a wiser man as he grew older-less of a Democrat, he said, but not less of a Liberal. This book enjoyed the great advantage of John Lever's revisionand the letters in which the proofs were returned to McGlashan are full of point.

Some of the earlier chapters being short, Lever assured McGlashan that the next would be full and a bumper: the tap, he hoped, was good, if the measure was deficient. The story sped, but McGlashan considered "Tierney" rather an unlucky wight, and again Lever sought to console the shrewd Scot by promising that Tierney should have a long run on the red, for all his losses in black.

VOL. II.

M

In November, 1850, Lever was busy preparing for a journey to Rome with his family, and had only time to send a few pages, but preferred to send even a link than leave the chain broken. The removal of a long retinue to Rome was not so easy as when a man's effects could be put in a carpet bag. A loan he had made, and which he now began to suspect would never be repaid, had given him a sore blow in what he styled his "financial bread-basket," and at a time, too, when the increasing expenses of his family exacted greater outlay, so that he was still swimming against the tide, and getting, he added, terribly tired of the exertion.

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Dr. Anster, author of a fine translation of Goethe's Faustus," warmly praised by Coleridge, had just reviewed Lever in very laudatory terms. The author thanked Anster nicely. He knew few men by whom he would rather be praised, even with exaggeration. He felt more obliged to him for his friendly tone, than for all the ingeniously turned compliments. The author had died out of him many a day since-the man was as much alive as ever.

Two loans, which seemed not likely to be repaid, and a heavy loss at play, crippled Lever hand and foot, and preyed upon him mentally to that degree that for days together, as he said, he could not write a line, and when his matter had been written and sent off really forgot whether it were actually committed to paper, or was lying crude in his brain. To retrench in Florence, where they had always lived in the best and consequently the

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most expensive set, would have been, he said, impossible. To leave it would have incurred great expense; and so, horned by the dilemma, Lever described himself as alternately fretting and hoping, writing, dining, riding, and talking away-to all seeming the most easy minded of mortals, but, as Hood said, "sipping champagne on a tight-rope." At last one of the men he had accommodated threw him, by way of payment, in March, 1851, a series of bills for £50 each at successive dates for a year. These he could not get cashed in Florence under 20 per cent. Lever loudly complained of the fiend-like conduct of one party, and the Jewish rascality of the other.

His letters of this time, dilate on the sad fate of Eliot Warburton. He had been recently lost in the "Amazon," just as another friend of Lever's, Tyrone Power, had previously found his tomb in the "President." Lever was painfully struck by finding that Warburton, in one of his books, makes a leading character perish in this way, and describes, with thrilling fidelity, the terrible spectacle of a ship on fire. Warburton, Hayman, and O'Sullivan were three fast friendships formed by Lever in Ireland. The shamrock he had cultivated was now. broken. By voice and pen he urged the tardy recognition of eminent powers in the promotion to the See of Meath of Mortimer O'Sullivan, but Dr. Singer got the mitre vacant by Dr. Townsend's death.

Lever's family were much alarmed in March, 1851, at hearing that Florence was on the eve of a great row

that the anniversary of the Milan revolt was to be celebrated by a fresh outbreak. Prince Leichenstein,. who commanded there, dined with Lever, and said that if they were afraid they ought to move off before the 14th; but as Lever never believed that Italianscould tell truth, he vowed to a friend he would not budge. And he continued to sit on the slumbering volcano. When, at length, he did move, which was not till August, it was the intolerable heat that drove him out of it. He described the nights as having ceased to become colder than the days-sleep was unrefreshing and all appetite gone, and that the pale faces of his poor children left him no alternative but flight to Spezzia. Since his arrival there they had lived on the water-the delicious blue waves of the Gulf. Of all the spots he had ever seen, Spezzia was the most beautiful, and he told his publishers, in reply to appeals for copy, that he could actually do nothing, think of nothing, but sit on the rocks, half-nude, with his children, and dream away the whole day.

Continued happiness like this was too much to hope for on earth. When bathing in the blue waters of Spezzia (Sept. 1851) he was roused from a delicious dream by the sting of an electric fish, which caused his arm to swell to an immense size, accompanied by terrible inflammation and excruciating pain. By leeching he at length subdued the torture, but he described himself as much pulled down, and robbed of all the good that the sea-air had at first effected. He was now preparing to

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arrange his ideas in train for a grand series of tableaux : but again his patience was put to the test. He complained that the hotel which he selected had of late been completely given up to all that piano-playing, guitar-twitching, sol-faing and yelling which every one in Italy indulges in, more indeed in public than in their own homes.

"In 1852," writes Major D, "when the Conservative Ministry came into power, Lever was summoned to London for the purpose of being made director of the Conservative Press, in the way in which Mr. Delane was of the Liberal one. I suspect it was the present Lord Derby, and also Sir H. D. Wolff, who had him brought over. Lever was sent to Lord Lyndhurst, then a very fine old man, but very deaf. Lever recounted the interview to me in nearly the following words:-'I was shown into a room where Lord Lyndhurst was seated at one end of a long table, he motioned me to take a seat at the other end. I saw at once that he was a wonderful old man, with whom no one could dare to trifle or waste time, besides which I had been cautioned that he was very deaf. So I determined to be as brief as possible, and go directly to the point. So when his Lordship said, 'Well, Mr. Lever, what principle do you propose for the direction of our Press at this time?' 'As much good sense, my lord, as the party will bear.' 'That will do, Mr. Lever, that will do.' So Lever made his bow and retired, and at a meeting of the Leaders at the Carlton, held immediately afterwards, Lord Lyndhurst was asked what arrange