EDITORIAL WORRIES.

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and said good morning. They however took fright, and took counsel, and ended by offering me such a definite and unmistakable control as I had stipulated for originally, and it now remains to be seen whether they will act as they promised-otherwise Je m'en vais, ou m'en va -for Picnot said on his death-bed, 'Remember, gentlemen, they are both good grammar!'"

Among other editorial worries he complained of an article on Mr. C-——, a contemporary Irish novelist, which had just been inserted. He saw no necessity for many of the allusions to other writers, nor any disparagement of good and worthy men, to extenuate the faults of one he believed very much the reverse. His genius was less questionable ground, and might have satisfied any admirer. "I remember an old apothecary in Derry, whose greatest confidence in materia medica lay in asafoetida, and he went so far as to regard it as a perfume, and really the notice of C- reminds me of him." Some of the newspapers had been good enough to attribute the paper to Lever, a compliment for which he felt by no means grateful.

The "O'Donoghue," which had long been appearing in monthly parts, was not brought to a close till late this year. Touching its catastrophe he wrote to McGlashan that he feared it would not content his Tory friends, who seemed to think that Mark should grace a gallows, and all the agencies of rebellion be victimized.

Of Lever it might be said, as Ampère remarked in speaking of Ozanam, that "the largeness of his concep

camp

tion taught him to recognise sympathies outside the in which he fought." Lever found himself in the end belonging not decidedly to either one party or the other, but gazing from his observatory at Templeogue with thorough philosophy upon both.

"I care not a fig

For Tory or Whig,

But sit in a bowl and kick round me,"

is the motto inscribed on the titlepage of "O'Dowd "a series of jottings mainly autobiographic.

His final year in Dublin was passed, not in the easy chair of an editorial autocrat, but on what he called "the high stool of repentance," or rather between two very irksome stools. The Nation assailed him from one side, the Mail and Warder from the other.

His gaze, from what he called his observatory, was not confined to social or political life. He read character in books, and amused himself a good deal in reviewing.*

* A paper on Walpole's " Memoirs of the Reign of George the Third" appears in the "D. U. M." for February, 1845. He regarded the early years of this reign as the cradle of our existing institutions, and the origin of those two great camps of party which for more than a century have divided between them the government of this country. Another review— one of Thiers's "Consulate and the Empire" (April 1845) favourably contrasts with his tone towards Thiers in later letters. Lever's Gallic sympathies are apparent in this paper. He condemns the tone of Scott's "Life of Napoleon," in which he says "imputations are laid and motives attributed, which neither facts warrant nor inferences enforce, and that a party bias pervades the writer, who is never satisfied save when tracing a hatred to England, and a Gallican perfidy in every act or word of the Consul or the Emperor" (vide "D. U. M.," v. xxv., p. 492). "Constantinople," by Charles White, was reviewed by Lever ("D. U. M.," v. xxv., p. 331). Lever, who had always had a passion for rambling, began by saying that the East had become to us what France and Germany were to our grandfathers, and

CHAINED TO THE OAR.

93

Rest followed; and Hayman was told that he did nothing but crack some trashy "Nuts" as a compromise for blue pill, for bile must be bullied. He was out of sorts, felt dissatisfied with the treatment he had received from his publishers, and said that if Curry and Co. did not definitely close that day, he would lie down on his pillow un roi abdiqué, and that Hayman might prepare to receive les adieux au Fontainebleau, and to swear allegiance to the new editorial Bourbon, but that, unlike Napoleon, he would never absolve him from his love and affection. The day of abdication was staved off by a well-timed submission to Lever's views.

Braced for

Once more he found himself chained to the oar; and with an eye firmly fixed on the future. a fresh start, he asked Hayman for muscular help. He did not like the boat with his bench unoccupied.* Of the magazine his final experience was, that it only hampered and worried, while it benefited him neither in fame nor in pocket. He was still acting editor. In sending a hard book to Hayman for review, he said, that if the task "bored him, to pitch it-not to the d--, but back again

that we should soon hear of little tea-parties of elderly spinsters on the wall of China; while Gregory Greendrake would doubtless desert lake and tarn to visit Behring's Straits, imitating the giant in story,

"Who baited his hook with a dragon's tail,

Sat down on a rock and bobbed for a whale."

* Hayman's Papers he never looked at, whether in copy or in the proof slips, not wishing to mar the pleasure in store for him. Literature in papillotes was, he said, a sad destroyer of one's admiration for the muse en grande toilette.

to that other unfortunate devil, Charles Lever, who would do his best to break his teeth on it."

The winter of 1844 found him more than ever anxious to "cut the cable." The debility and depression consequent on a sharp attack of influenza darkened his hopes. Every alternate week he bought a guide-book or a map, and within the autumn had travelled over all Europe in spirit, and spent several winters in Dresden Florence, Rome and Vienna. He declared to Hayman that for the studied malignity his residence in Ireland provoked, he had been unprepared; but as there was only one thing worse than a wrong step-persistence in it-he should not remain longer in such troubled waters.

Again he recurred, with increased warmth and decision, to the same theme. "I am off to Brussels and the Rhine, to Dresden and to Vienna, heartily sick of drudgery, printers, publishers, and small literati, with little brains and much malice; and behold me at last, worn-out, impatient, and standing with my carpet bag ready for a start! When I shall return, if ever, I know not. My trip is partly for health, to end as God pleases. For myself I am satisfied to seek out a tranquil place in a foreign land, and work away among my children, and consent to be as thoroughly forgotten as I am now a prominent object for attack." He desired to have a word

In the intervals of coughing and sneezing he tried to do some work, for which, as he said to Hayman, that beastly malady, a cold in the head, must be responsible for the stupidity. Mrs. Lever had alone escaped the compliments of the season, and was the only one of the family who could avoid substituting the letter L for N.

A NEST OF HORNETS.

95

at parting with Hayman, the only friend his last three years had given him; a friend so sincerely esteemed, that he sorrowed not to have seen him again at Templeogue, and to have told him how dear he was to all around his fireside.

"Man proposes!" Next morning he awoke to find himself an utter cripple by gout: which left him unable to do aught, as he said, but mope and despond. A short missive to Mr. Curry asked for some money due to him, as the bores of the year, "the Compliments of the Season,”* came dunning so sure as he felt out of sorts. This gentleman's death, which took place soon after, arose from injuries sustained on board the Holyhead boat when, during a lurch of the ship, he was precipitated from his berth to the floor of the cabin.

Bile and dyspepsia were not yet uprooted from Lever's system, and we may, perhaps, trace to their presence some share of the tone which tinges his unreserved utterances. Not long before he speaks of vile headaches not leaving him night or day after three months' endurance, a goad which the most serene of natures might vainly try to withstand. From within and without stings came-Tory and Radical organs attacked and worried him. His exit was stimulated by the stings which, as from a nest of hornets, followed him. He was piqued against Ireland, and lost temper in alluding to the period of his editorial connection with that country. The sharpest sting, however, had come from England, as Mr. Hall's letter shows.