SIR PHILIP CRAMPTON.

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here as graphically illustrative of a scene in which it was Lever's fate more than once to bear a part.

"Dinner with its slight skirmishing chit-chat was over; and as the bottle went round, the host opened fire upon the unsuspecting victim. Sir Philip in a voice ever soft, gentle, and low, that commanded attention, took up the subject which he illustrated with the play of his own delicate humour, and held his auditors spell-bound. When he paused, Lever was about to go in,' but he was at once bowled out' by the host, and so the two kept it up till near midnight, never suffering Lever to get an 'inning.' Sir Philip went away first, and as the burly host shook Lever by the hand, he said with the slyest humour, as a smile lurked round his mouth, 'What a delightful evening you both gave me. Sir Philip was in great force. to-night, but then you drew him out so cleverly."

The brilliant baronet-half Hercules, half Adonis as he was-was just the sort of man not to be géné by the prestige of Lever's name. Few possessed a more imposing presence or greater confidence. In the eyes of the

Lever sometimes yielded to pique by putting real people in his books. A whisper went that "Lorrequer" would yet impale "the General of the Lancers," as the Surgeon-General, Sir Philip Crampton, was called. Lever, we hope, was guiltless of the practical joke played upon him late one night, when a messenger came to say that a great personage had fallen from his horse in College Green-Crampton on arrival finding King William's statue blown by gunpowder from his charger.

† Dr. S——, the pupil of Crampton, tells us that so long as he was sitting, he carried all before him. Put Crampton on his legs, as a lecturer or illustrator, and at once he became painfully powerless. He adds:"Sir Philip liked Lever chiefly, I think, because he was a good dresser. The same reason led this brilliant man to maintain a cordial intimacy with Surgeon R―, who, unlike Lever, was the dullest of companions,"

faculty he held a rank equal to that of Sir Astley Cooper; while Lever, as a junior surgeon patronised by Crampton in early struggles, must have felt a wee bit small beside him. From that day forth he could not say with the Duchess de Maine, "I am very fond of company; for I listen to no one, and every one listens to me."

As he grew older and wiser, he daily showed more tact in talk. He lost that desire to dominate which, it must be confessed, he seemed to hold when in the plenitude of his oral power. "Like an expert cricketer," said Wilde, as he gave us his impressions of him, "he always watched for the right moment to strike the ball, and, with practised decision, place it amid bursts of applause beyond the reach of his competitors." The moral which Lever himself drew from his earlier experience as a conversationalist is to be found in "O'Dowd."

"Not a monologist like Macaulay, nor an overbearing opinionist like Croker, nor a flippant epigrammatist like Thiers, my skill was pre-eminently employed in eliciting whatever latent stories of agreeability I could detect around me. Not merely a talker myself, I made talkers of others. No rock so dull that I could not elicit a spark from it; no table-land so barren that I could not find a wild-flower in its desolation."

With another irrepressible talker, Archbishop Whately, Lever had been acquainted from an early period. At Brussels he often joined Lever's receptions; but from the time of his removal to Ireland a more reticent intercourse and mien were maintained, notwithstanding that

ARCHBISHOP WHATELY.

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Lever noticed him favourably in the first number of the magazine published under his management. Lever soon after had invited him to dinner, and as horticulture was one of the Archbishop's hobbies, the host took great pains to make his dinner party of such material as might best consort with his great guest's humour. What, however, was his discomfiture to find that his Grace's chaplain arrived to make the Archbishop's apologies, and convey his sincere regret at some untoward impediment to the promised pleasure! He brought with him, however, an enormous pumpkin grown in the episcopal hothouse; and this, with an air of well-assumed admiration, the host directed should be placed in the chair which his Grace ought to have occupied, directing to the comely vegetable much of his talk during the dinner; and when the time of coffee came, saying as they arose, "In all my experience of his Grace, I never knew him so agreeable as to-day."

* Canon Hayman asks us :-"Why did Dr. Whately turn against Lever, after the author's arrival in Dublin? My impression is that it was not personal, but an editorial, dislike. Whately was a good hater. If he was a true friend, and no truer breathed, he was a bitter foe. Now the ‘D. U. M.' had incurred the Archbishop's pique, not only for a decided divergence in politics from him, but particularly for an article (vol. v., pp. 528-544) called 'Historic Doubts relative to the Archbishop of Dublin.' I have always understood that this paper was the joint-stock contribution of several-the two O'Sullivans (Samuel and Mortimer), Butt, and others. It was taking up the Archbishop's line of argument in relation to Napoleon Bonaparte, in which, on sceptical grounds, he demonstrated that Napoleon never existed, and thus confuted infidels by the use of history. One must read the article itself to understand it. Suffice it, that dwelling on what the writers of it deemed the Archbishop's inconsistencies, they logically demonstrated his non-existence. I have been informed that Dr. Whately suffered acutely by perusing this paper, as though an opening in his armour

A coolness existed, but intercourse did not stop. Dr. Whately in dealing blows around, did not exempt Lever. The latter had generally honeyed words, but he could sometimes drop a sting. The Archbishop was notoriously susceptible to flattery. One day his Grace received a number of guests, including a large proportion of the expectant clergy, who paid profound court to the mighty Metropolitan. While walking through adjacent grounds Dr. Whately plucked a fungus from the trunk of a tree, declaring that such things were really nutritious; that in some countries the inhabitants ate them with gusto, and that prejudice alone deterred the Irish peasantry from doing the same. The Archbishop with his long clasp-knife cut a slice, requesting one of the clergy to taste it. He obeyed, and then, with a wry face, is said to have subscribed to the botanical orthodoxy of his master. "Taste it," said the gratified prelate, handing another slice to Lever. "Thank your Grace," he said, declining it; " my brother is not in your diocese."

Lever, sore and susceptible, received the scorch of Dr. Whately's caustic wit, but the details of the operation have not been preserved. "He was very thin skinned," writes his friend Major D, "and never forgot some snub he received from the Archbishop, who was asked to meet Lever at dinner in Dublin. Lever harped upon the Dean of Drumcondra for ever."

had been hit; and that he nourished his wrath against the magazine for evermore. What more natural than his dislike to the jaunty novelist, who came to Dublin to assume the editorial reins."

HOW TO LASSO A BULL.

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This dignitary figures prominently in "Roland Cashel," especially in chapter the twelfth, descriptive of Mrs. Kennyfeck's dinner party; where he is represented as demonstrating how to lasso a Swiss bull by holding up his napkin over the head of the hostess, to the injury of her turban and bird of paradise plume. "When you represent a bull, ma'am, you should not have feathers," the dean is made to exclaim with a rough endeavour to restore the broken plume. "Had you held your head lower down, in the attitude of a bull's attack, I should have lassoed you at once and without difficulty."

It was whispered at the time that the caricatured face of Dr. Singer, afterwards Bishop of Meath, peeped from this book; but there is no proof for the statement. Lever himself told McGlashan: "I had only one portrait; the rest are mere fancy sketches. If my dean is like, I confess I intended it." These clerical caricatures are believed by Lever's friends to have operated against the promotion of his brother, a man of rare mark, whose sweetness was wasted on the desert air of Ardnurchur.

The Archiepiscopal crosier had smitten the Irish wit; and Lever to the end preserved his rod in pickle. He had arrangements made, shortly before his death, for the introduction, in full proportion and well studied detail, of Archbishop Whately, in a new book. Mr. Clibborne, Curator of the Royal Irish Academy, received a call from Lever on his last visit to Dublin, when he was asked, on the strength of an old school friendship, to collect Whatelyana for the crucible at Trieste.