tone of thought, causing your ideas to mingle with his, and float joyously onward upon the glittering current of his conversation."

If Lever caught a tartar in the Tuscan tailor, he found a worthy in a Saxon one. Pleasant accounts come from the tailor, at whose house, 33, Brook Street, he lodged when in London. "Night after night when it would have been much better to be in bed, I sat up listening to Mr. Lever's stories-sometimes in chinks of laughter -often spell-bound."

From old Lord Lytton a kind letter came, inviting Lever and his daughter Sydney to Knebworth. Lever had never been in higher spirits, and shouted no end of droll stories into the now deaf ear of the author of "Devereux." Lord Lytton took up incorrectly something said; and Lever, on his return to town, complained that "he had become very touchy."

He passed his last week in London not unpleasantly, picking up character in regions where it had often been lost. The Law Courts presented attraction to him, especially the great Tichborne trial, of which it was full. With all his keen discernment of character, he seems to have been duped by the Claimant. He described him as a vulgar beast to view, but that he was Sir Roger and no Dodger for all that.

Thackeray's hostility to Miss Pardoe, Miss Brontë, and other women-of which we find trace in the record of Major D's conversations with him, appended to this work-led Lever to believe that he understood one side

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of female character only, and was unable to do justice to the whole. "Lever and I," writes the Major, “had a conversation on this subject as we drove through Park Lane on our way to Onslow Gardens; both of us expressed regret at this blemish, as we thought it, in Thackeray's fine power of perception; and Lever wound up by saying, Every man has a double nature in him: the one masculine, and partaking more of the mere animal; the other feminine, and this is by far the best part of him; but it must be awakened. Not everyone is so happy in this respect as I have been. I never fully knew or appreciated all the exquisite beauty and tenderness of the female character until my own daughters came to console and support me under the greatest affliction I have ever had to bear. They, poor things, will never know how much I feel indebted to them, nor how deeply grateful I am to them.'"

One having married, a gushing acquaintance wrote Lever a long letter of congratulation. He drily replied that the match was one to conciliate all his sympathies, for the sposo was rich, saving, and a staunch Calvinist : three strong guarantees for this life and the next.

But never was there a man less mercenary or calculating. It having been represented to him that Mr., who greatly loved his eldest daughter, and who at this time asked permission to call, was not opulent, he replied, "There is something to be thought of besides. money in the world."

CHAPTER XI.

His place of punishment-His last book-Death of his wife-The finger of Death inscribes "Finis" on his career-Recollections of the last scene -His works, worth, and character.

THE excitement which gilded his last visit to the sun-lit spots of youth, was followed by a reaction, and he would sometimes on his return to Italy think tenderly both of Ireland and of England, and sigh to renew relations with the brilliant men who thronged the tables of Lord Lytton, or Lord Houghton, or to commune with the Cosmopolitan Club, where he declared the acme of pleasant talk was to be found. Dublin, his first love, he saw for the last time; and when leaving its bay, he "cast a longing, lingering look behind." A friend tried to console him. His exile had, at least, one advantage, it removed him from the snare of social enjoyments and gave him fuller scope for that work which the world could not afford to lose.

Mr. Dicey writes: "He was far away from his old haunts, friends and associations, and he pined sadly to get nearer home. I am going back to my place of punishment,' so he said to the present writer, when he was leaving London for the last time. A year after he

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wrote to a friend here, describing how he had invited a small party to celebrate his birthday, and had had to put them off owing to a fresh attack of illness, adding, with his wonted humour, the guests were, however, consoled by the reflection that their loss of the entertainment would soon be made up for by an invitation to my funeral."

Macaulay

Ere long, a pleasanter invitation came. once got quizzed for dating a letter from Windsor Castle. Lever hoped that the same measure would not be extended to him for announcing to his old friend F. D., that he had just been the guest of the Emperor of Austria. This was in March, 1870.

At Trieste he had secured as a residence the very elegant Villa Gasteiger, but the place itself did not improve on acquaintance. A fish in a cornfield-his own figure-could not be more out of its element. More than once he found himself on the verge of pitching up the Consulate, and throwing himself, as he said, on "Pennya-lining;" and nothing but the break-up, which could not be far distant, deterred him; and as he sank down into greater apathy every day, he said it mattered less when he finished, since the mode of finish must be pretty much the same everywhere!

So long as he could turn to any sort of work, he might prevent his brain, as he said, digesting itself; but latterly all such occupation was impossible, and he had fallen into great depression. Some of the thorns which helped to create the unpleasantness of his exile have

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been pushed into light. Others, which he makes grow pleasantly, as though from a hawthorn-tree, peep forth in a missive from Trieste.

"T'other day one of those creatures who presume on the fact of being an old schoolfellow, to maintain an acquaintanceship, dormant for half a lifetime, as if there could be any bond of friendship cemented by having been flogged by the same cane, came through the neighbourhood where I have pitched my tent, and installed himself as my guest;" and then follows a long account of his sufferings, trying to entertain one of the dullest of men, who said the most mal-à-propos things, and touched on the sorest of points.

When freed from this bore, he resumed "Kilgobbin," and worked with a will. "He wrote as a man for men," observes a thoroughly congenial guest, Mr. Dicey; "the mental struggle of dissatisfied schoolgirls, the complications arising out of a young lady's hesitation as to the proprieties of her engagement, the flirtations of curates, had no attractions for that vigorous manly mind."

Had Lever pandered to sensationalism, he would have died no doubt a richer man. But he resisted all temptation, and held on his old course austerely. His thoughts on this point will be found in a paper called “The Picturesque in Morals," urging that the great effort of moralists should be to keep vice to its coarse habiliments, and never let it masquerade in the bright costumes and graceful colours that captivate. "Vice is not so seductive, as vice in its travesty of what we