three-volume people are so prone to inflict; neither have they so much of the page open to emotional expatiation. They are bound by their very limits to be more sharp, short, and decisive; moreover, the reader is not bound to them beyond the monthly part before him. "It is like a shilling stage, and if you dislike the conveyance, or feel tired of the company, you can get out and walk home." For all these reasons he inclined to the serial. Lever, from his prolonged companionship with Mr. G. P. R. James, seems to have been let into the secret of his modus operandi. He declared that all the threevolume man ever thought of was his wind up. “It is for the grand finish alone he cares; his heart, like the Irish postilions, is fixed on keeping a 'trot for the town,' no matter how he stumbled and staggered during the stage, so that he comes up to the door at last with whip cracking and the jaded team spirited up to a lively tramp." Lever's letters show that it was the "wind up" he invariably found most difficult.

All criticisms on his monthly parts, as they appeared, he desired to see. Less thin-skinned than of yore, he asked his friends in Ireland to send him every sort of notice. Praise and blame came diluted by distance, less cloying if sweet-less acid if sour-but in either case more profitable. To his publishers, he more than once said, that there was nothing he disliked more than to be asked to fill up the tail-pieces of numbers; it was as hard as to clear off the bottom of decanters.

From revision, too, he continued to recoil. In 1858

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he said that he wished he could as easily apologise for the faults of his stories, as he could detect and deplore them; but, like the failings in one's nature, they are often difficult to correct even when acknowledged.

A suggestion having been thrown out by his publishers, that one of his stories, as it verged towards the "finis," might be advantageously extended, he replied, that having put the characters to bed, he had no heart. to waken them up again for the sake of shaking the feathers and arranging the pillows more comfortably, and then breaking the figure as the indomitable fertility of his fancy constantly made him do-added that he had the bones of a better book in the chamber of his head; but when his skeleton would clothe with flesh, was more than he could say.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Davenport Dunn "-"One of Them"-"Gerald Fitzgerald"-SiennaLever and his daughter capsized in the Bay of Spezzia-Their narrow escape-Garibaldi visits him for a political end-Hurls a rude fellow into a reservoir-Action taken against Lever by a Tuscan-Stinging retort to Sir H-E-A gossiping neighbourhood.

THE year 1859 introduced "Davenport Dunn, the Man of our Day," which effectively utilised some leading incidents in the life of John Sadleir, Junior Lord of the Treasury, who, after an unscrupulous career, is alleged to have committed suicide at Hampstead. This the Athenæum pronounced to be Lever's best book, one sufficiently full of stir to satisfy a schoolboy's love for adventure, yet strong enough in portrait-painting to attract graver men. Davenport Dunn" embraced one of the best of his characters-Grog Davis, whose strength of character is ingeniously reproduced to a better purpose in his high-hearted daughter-a strength so skilfully contrasted with the weak frivolity of the young aristocrat, their associate.

แ

He interspersed his story with much pleasant matter. To his publisher he said that the light horse of literature fought best as skirmishers, and displayed any little

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brilliancy they possessed when acting independently of discipline.

His official labours at Spezzia were not proportioned to the width of its waters. In fact he had not much more to do than boat and bask on its beautiful Bay. He described it as capable of containing all the harbours of France and England, and have room for all the fleets of Europe besides. About seven miles in depth, and varying in width from two to three and a half, it is fissured on every side by beautiful little bays, with deep water everywhere, and, not a sunk rock or shoal, or a bar, throughout the whole extent.

Here, in his pretty cottage, Marola, he wrote "One of Them," published in 1861. After describing his Dispensary, and struggles at Portstewart, the reader is brought to Florence, where a good glimpse of diplomatic life is disclosed. This book was partly autobiographic, and, en passant, we catch a glimpse even of his gout. He is described as "muffled up in rugs, and his foot on a stool; and in all the restlessness of that painful malady. A mass of unopened letters lay on the table beside him, littered as it was with physic bottles, pill-boxes, and a small hand bell. On the carpet, around him, lay the newspapers and reviews, newly arrived, but all indignantly thrown aside, and uncared for."

To Mr. Labouchere, who asked him to name whichever of his novels he deemed best suited for the stage, he replied, that if a sensation drama were required, he thought "One of Them" a good subject, but that "Kil

gobbin " would be the best for dialogue. He also thought that "O'Donoghue" might, from its stirring incident, have a good chance of success.

The Irish serial, for which Lever wrote, passed, after Mr. McGlashan's death, into the hands of Mr. Digby Starkey and Mr. Cheyne Brady, who filled in the Law Courts the dryest of dry offices, but to whom letters were not wholly distasteful. Overtures were made to Lever to resume his old connection, and the serial story of "Gerald Fitzgerald" was the result. This was the name of a college chum, one of the signatories to the sham address in 1831. The story made no material addition to his fame, and is the only one of Lever's which seems never to have been reprinted.

"At Sienna, where Garibaldi was then with his legion," observes Robert Maunsell, "I called upon Lever, having known his brother the clergyman, who attended my kinsman, the murdered Earl of Norbury, on his death-bed, apparently to his great annoyance, as he told him he knew all he had to say. Lever was all animation; but Mrs. Lever, then in the decline of life, seemed delicate and languid: always reclining on the sofa, and dressed effectively, sometimes a white morning-gown, richly brocaded, her person exhibiting traces of great beauty. Lever at this time was not of a prepossessing appearance. He was so corpulent, that when seated, his legs seemed hidden. But he could swim well; and, indeed, sometimes seemed amphibious; he and all his