GRAND DUKES DENOUNCED.

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spring, and the budget of his army by the licence of a gambling house."*

These remarks had been suggested to Lever by seeing quoted, from "Howitt's Germany," a passage to the effect that "you may sometimes see a Grand Duke come into a country inn, call for his glass of ale, drink it, and pay for it. The consequence of this easy familiarity," said Mr. Howitt, "is, that princes are everywhere popular, and the daily occurrence of their presence amongst the people prevents that absurd crush and stare at them which prevails in more luxurious and exclusive countries." Lever admitted that princes do go into inns, call for ale, and drink ita fact, however, which he put the less value upon, "inasmuch as the inn is pretty much like the prince's own house, the ale very like what he has at home, and the innkeeper as near as possible in breeding, manner, and appearance, his equal."†

All this is so characteristic of Lever that we give it; but it must not be taken literally. He well knew how to praise and vindicate the Grand Duke of Tuscany when hurled from his throne in 1849. The Grand Dukes who were his special aversion were those of Baden and Lucca.§ From such swells he was glad to

* “D. U. M.,” vol. xxi., pp. 323-4. + Ibid.

lbid, "The Tuscan Revolution," vol. xxxiii., p. 531, et seq. § An important change of residence which Lever made during his continental sojourn was to a chateau belonging to the lord chamberlain of one of those Grand Dukes, but names need not be mentioned here. He rented it furnished; and part of the bait which had lured him on previously viewing the bed-rooms, were silver jugs and basins, belonging apparently to each; but

turn to the society of men of letters, when luckily they could be found. Occupying the same hotel with him at Bagni di Lucca was a congenial spirit, Mr. Honan, the correspondent of the Times. Lever was not so well pleased to find also under the same roof that irrepressible Blue and keenly observant sketcher Mrs. Trollope.

The spring of 1849 found his pen in more repose than his mind. What with the fracas of a royal duke just fled and a baby just come, incessant alarms of pillage, rapine, and Red Republicanism, he had been unable, he said, to think of aught else-trees of liberty and barricades impeded his progress. One good magazine paper, "The Italian Questions," predicted that the fate of Leopold of Tuscany would soon be that of Pio Nono. Both he strongly praised as reformers. In April, 1849, he wrote on "The Tuscan Revolution," which, as he foresaw, promptly came, and the Grand Duke, whose "sincere and single-minded desire for the happiness of his people had been the mainspring of all his actions,"* followed to Gaeta the fugitive Pope. Lever correctly gave it to be understood that the Republic could not last, but seriously doubted whether the Grand Ducal power

on entering into possession one set only could be found. It transpired that, according as Lever's party viewed each bedroom in the first instance, and ere they had left it, a zealous retainer adroitly carried away the silver basin and jug to the next, while at the same time completely carrying out the illusion. "Lever," writes one who accompanied him, "had also been dazzled by a bright flag which waved gaily from the turret tower; but a servant of the Lord Chamberlain's, whom Lever hired, told us that he had spent his wife's money building this castle, and both had long vegetated within on miserably straitened means."

* "D. U. M.," February, 1849, p. 531, vol. xxxiii.

"ROLAND CASHEL."

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His narrative of the

could ever be re-established. Revolution is a valuable historic document, penned by the aid of no ordinary lights.

"Roland Cashel,”—planned on the lake of Como,—was written during a period of enjoyment which no part of Lever's after life approached in glow. When at last gloom laid its cold grasp on him, he would derive solace from casting a lingering look on the sunlit spots of past existence. Some weeks before his death, his pencil traced the following genial retrospect: "There, in a lovely little villa, the 'Cima,' on the border of the lake, with that glorious blending of Alpine scenery and gardenlike luxuriance around me, and little or none of interruption or intercourse, I had abundant time to make acquaintance with my characters, and follow them into innumerable situations, and through adventures far more extraordinary and exciting than I dared afterwards to

recount.

"I do not know how it may be with other story-tellers, but I have to own for myself that the personages of a novel gain over one at times a degree of interest very little inferior to that inspired by living and real people, and that this is especially the case when I have found myself in some secluded spot and seeing little of the world. To such an ascendancy has this deception attained, that more than once I have found myself trying to explain why this person should have done that, and by what impulse that other was led into something else. In fact, I have found that there are conditions of the mind in which purely

imaginary creations assume the characters of actual people, and act positively as though they were independent of the will that invented them.

"Of the strange manner in which imagination can thus assume the mastery, and for a while at least have command over the mind, I cannot give a stronger instance within my own experience than the mode in which this story was first conceived. When I began I intended that the action should be carried on in the land where the tale opened. The scene on every side of me had shed its influence; the air was weighty with the perfume of the lime and the orange. To days of dazzling brilliancy there succeeded nights of tropical splendour, with stars of almost preternatural magnitude streaking the calm lake with long lines of light. To people a scene like this, with the sort of characters that might befit it, was rather a matter of necessity with me than choice, and it was then that Maritaña revealed herself to me with a charm of loveliness I have never been able to repicture." An avalanche of adventures on land and sea was planned. Scenes rose before him of prairie life and lonely rides of the Pampas, of homes where the civilized man had never seen a brother, nor heard a native tongue. He speaks of the great hold the characters had taken in his mind; how they peopled the landscape around, but how winter drove him at last to move into Florence. "The new life of this place, and the interest they excited, so totally unlike all that I had left at my villa, effected a complete revolution in my

A RETROSPECT BY THE ARNO.

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thoughts, utterly routing the belief I had indulged in as to the characters of my story, and the incidents in which they displayed themselves. Up to this, all my efforts had been, as it were, to refresh my mind as to a variety of events and people I had once known, and to try if I could not recall certain situations which had interested me. Now the spell was broken, all the charm of the illusion gone, and I awoke to the dreary consciousness of my creatures being mere shadows, and their actions as unreal as themselves.

"There is a sort of intellectual bankruptcy in such awakenings; and I know of few things so discouraging as this sudden revulsion from dreamland to the cold terra firma' of unadorned fact. There was little in the city we now lived in to harmonize with 'romance.' It was, in fact, all that realism could accomplish with the aids of every taste and passion of modern society.

"Instead of the Orinoco and its lands of feathery palms, I had now before me the Arno and its gay crowds of loungers, the endless tide of equipages, and the strong pulse-beat of an existence that even in the highways of life denotes passion and emotion. What I had of a plan was lost to me from that hour. I was again in the whirlpool of active existence, and the world around me was deep-triple deep-in all cases of loving and hating, and plotting and gambling, of intriguing, countermining, and betraying, as very polite people would know how to do: occupations to watch, which inspire an intensity of interest unknown in any other condition of existence.