leading Conservative organ, he was obliged to dip his pen in it.

Rarely had the Thunderer roared louder. In attacking Repeal, Ireland and the Irish were assailed. Lever found his position an irksome one. He was now reading up material for "The Knight of Gwynne;" and was struck by the difference of tone towards Ireland which marked the English press during the Union struggle, and at a later period. "Between the educated men of both countries," he writes, "there was scarcely a jealousy then. The character which political contest assumed later on, changed much of this spirit and dyed nationalities with an amount of virulence which, with all its faults and all its shortcomings, we do not find in the times of the 'Knight of Gwynne.'

History teaches and experience shows that the men who write well do not always talk well. Virgil and Socrates were as mute owls. "My conversation," says Dryden, "is slow and dull." Addison was tonguetied. Goldsmith was absent, silent, and blundering. Cobbett spoke badly. Washington Irving sent an apology to a literary dinner, lest he should be asked to speak. Grattan wrote with difficulty, as Bushe reminds us; and would tear up half a dozen successive efforts to pen a simple resolution.

Lever was strong in both gifts. Speaking behind the mask of Lord Kilgobbin, he writes: "The man who devotes himself to be a success in conversation, glories more in his triumphs, and sets a greater value on his

HIS DINNERS.

gifts than any other I know of."

67

Assuredly," observes a friend, "Lever prided himself as much on the charms of conversation as fair lady ever did on her beauty, and he had all the qualities that make a good talker-a face whose every muscle was flexible, rippling with fun and reflecting every phase of sentiment; eyes the merriest, a voice sweet and musical, that changed with every expression of feeling." But while thus seeming the incarnation of merriment, he often suffered, within, the utmost misery. A great thinker, Archbishop Whately, once happily said, "Gay spirits are always spoken of as a sign of happiness, though every one knows to the contrary. A cockchafer is never so lively as when a pin is stuck through his tail; and a hot floor makes bruin dance." On this point more presently.

The selection of Templeogue as a residence was, as we have said, mainly due to McGlashan. Its rather inaccessible situation checked the influx of visitors, and gave Lever more time for work. But many a bitter pang smote him on finding, as he sometimes did, a well organised dinner spoiled by the absence of some specially invited guest, or the tardy arrival of a fop that made the dinner one hour late. Some of these disappointments he glanced at in a lucubratory retrospect asking, "Is not the man who arrives late the man who need not arrive at all? Has the creature who has destroyed the fish and ruined the entrée, one, even one quality to indemnify you for the damage? Take the late men and answer me. Have you ever met one of them able, by the charm of

his converse or the captivation of his manners, to obliterate the memory of the dreary forty-five minutes your friends sat in the condemned cell of the ante-room longing for the last pang to be over?" In conclusion he declared that his experiences were most unhappy in this respect, and, referring to past efforts as host, proclaimed that nothing short of a superhuman geniality can conquer the gloom of an empty place. Another feature of the deference you show by

case presented itself. "In the waiting for the late-comer, or in your distress at the absence of him who comes not at all, your other guests fancy they detect some deep sense of obligation to the man, and infer that he is your patron or your protector, that he has lent you money, or dragged you out of some awkward scrape, and that you are bound to treat him with all respect and deference. I am certain that I have suffered from this pleasant imputation."

"Few men," said Macmillan, "were more smart and incisive in repartee, more epigrammatic in a sentiment, more brilliant in a narrative, or more witty before the best of all audiences-the audience round the dinner-table." This is all just, excepting the praise awarded to him for repartee. Judge L. tells us that he was not very happy in retorts. It was more as a narrator of the strange things he had seen, and the queer people he had known, that he made so pleasant an impression. Brussels was a favourite topic of his. This place-the gangway to the Rhine and to a certain extent a refugium peccatorumintroduced him to a crowd of odd characters, all of whom

MAGNIFICENT MONOLOGUE.

แ

69

he sketched inimitably. They usually drank a bad wine, which Lever termed rot-gut, but which they on returning to London innocently praised as ro-goo!" He was the best conversationalist that the Judge ever knew. Beside him Whiteside was simply nowhere. He even surpassed Anthony Richard Blake, of whom Sir Walter Scott speaks in glowing terms. So few talk well who write well that one cannot wonder that Maginn, after expressing in Fraser the delight with which he read "O'Malley" should add "Bravo Lever! If you can only tell stories as well as you write them, you would beat-" and here one of his strong figures followed.

As a story-teller he but once met his match, and that was the result of previous conspiracy. It was his oral success which at first led him to try his hand on written composition. The Edinburgh Review, on Curran's life, remarked that in England eminent men never made any attempt to shine in conversation. Shiel's description of Brougham at the head of his table, bears out this statement. The Irish, however, are a talking, rather than a reading people; and hence the flood of bons raconteurs which they have sent forth. Some say that Lever's talk approached too much to monologue, but this objection may have sprung from the pique felt by rival talkers who were driven to listen. A criticism uttered under the pressure of that feeling, which made Macaulay style pauses in Sydney Smith's talk "brilliant flashes of silence," expresses what we mean. One who vainly strove to edge in a word writes, "Lever's attitude and

tone completely reminded me of his crest-a cock perched on a trumpet!

A coming scene wherein Crampton figured, finds him. baulked in a not ungentlemanly way. But it was sometimes Lever's lot to find his progress stopped by some cur barking or biting at his heels. In one of his books he describes "the great talker of a company unexpectedly confronted by some unknown, undistinguished competitor, who, with the pertinacity of an actual persecution, will follow him through all the devious windings of an evening's conversation, ever present to correct, contradict, amend, or refute. In vain the hunted martyr seeks out some new line of country or starts new game; his tormentor is ever close behind."

Lever talked not to monopolise, but, as one well acquainted with him states, "Simply in the abandonment of himself to the sense of enjoyment—the exercise of a faculty that he knew not how to control." It might be said of him as Archbishop Whately once said, in reply to some one who remarked that a brother prelate had a wonderful command of language, "No; but language has a wonderful command of him. The rival talkers, however, sometimes had their revenge." And he proceeds to give another version of the anecdote told by Major D, descriptive of Remmy Sheehan's revenge in not allowing Lever, at table, to edge in a word. The supplemental touches to D--'s story claim admission

* Vide his Recollections, appended to this volume.