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Much of the time, I am sorry to say, was devoted to novels, but not those of a trashy sort. I read all of Bulwer's then published, Cooper's, Marryat's, Scott's, Washington Irving's works, Lever's, and many others that I do not now remember. Mathematics was very easy to me, so that when January came, I passed the examination, taking a good standing in that branch.
I had already enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in "Vanity Fair," about the Battle of Waterloo. It was not like Lever's accounts of battles, but it was enchanting. However, "Vanity Fair" was under a taboo. It is not easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himself informed a small boy, whom he found reading "Vanity Fair" under the table, that he had better read something else.
Lever's novels would lose many of their best situations but for this national accomplishment and the astounding development it reaches in his hands. To the left lies the fine park of Osterley, once the seat of the greatest of London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas Gresham. An improvement proposed by Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in 1578, does not speak highly for her taste in design.
The modern Irish priest is usually low-bred, vulgar, and ignorant. The priest of Lever's novels, brimming over with animal spirits, full of bonhomie, sparkling with wit and abounding with jovial good-nature, is nowhere to be found.
I therefore assure them that the sensation first came to me from Lever and may have come to him from Beyle, or at least out of the Stendhalian atmosphere. I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.
It is the enormous daily flow of population toward the centre that chokes the channels of locomotion, and the wisest method of checking this flow is to make it unnecessary, by establishing manufacturing colonies, on the pattern of Mr. Ellis Lever's and Mr. Cadbury's colonies at Port Sunlight and Bourneville.
Arithmetical diversions, in a cold chamber, were the intellectual treat which awaited Margaret and her companions. Arithmetic and slates! With her Colenso in her lap, Margaret Shields grappled for some time with the mysteries of Tare and Tret. "Tare an' 'ouns, I call it," whispered Janey Harman, who had taken, in the holidays, a "course" of Lever's Irish novels.
This style was a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat "promiscuous" plot and with lively but externally drawn characters the humours being furnished partly by Lever's native country, Ireland, and partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels.
His point of view never altered, and the peculiar attraction of his writings is always the same. Lever's books have the quality rather of speech than of writing; wherever you open the pages there is always a witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant.
To express a fear such as Farragut's, that a particular development of the material of war would injure the tone of the service, sounds to some as the mere echo of Lever's commissary, who reasoned that the abolition of pig-tails would sap the military spirit of the nation only that, and nothing more.
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