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Then seeing Stone's puzzled look he added: "The Huns had got their hooks on us when Dick Lever came along in his plane, gave them a few little leaden missives, picked us up and landed us here, right side up with care." Stone's eyes kindled as he heard their story, and his enthusiasm over Lever's feat was as great as their own. "But how did we make out in the big drive?" asked Frank.
Lever will scarcely visit you with such reflections, for the humorist of Lever's type never stands apart and smiles; he laughs loud and in company. Still less will he give you one of those speeches which are the supreme achievement of this faculty, where the speaker's philosophy is not reasoned out liked Falstaff's, but revealed in a flash of the onlooker's insight.
He said, 'He wished Lord Orford's pictures , and Sir Ashton Lever's Museum , might be purchased by the publick, because both the money, and the pictures, and the curiosities, would remain in the country; whereas, if they were sold into another kingdom, the nation would indeed get some money, but would lose the pictures and curiosities, which it would be desirable we should have, for improvement in taste and natural history.
Corney Delaney, the old manservant, may perhaps be named as an exception. Lever's novels will not live long, even if they may be said to be alive now, because it is so. What was his manner of working I do not know, but I should think it must have been very quick, and that he never troubled himself on the subject, except when he was seated with a pen in his hand.
Even the curiosities which have been brought from the discovered islands, and which enrich the British Museum, and the late Sir Ashton Lever's repository, may be considered as a valuable acquisition to this country; as supplying no small fund of information and entertainment.
He has no real comedy; there is nothing in Handy Andy half so ingenious as the story in Jack Hinton of the way Ulick Bourke acquitted himself of his debt to Father Tom. And behind all Lever's conventional types there is a real fund of observation and knowledge which is absolutely wanting in Lover, who simply lacked the brains to be anything more than a trifler.
We should include Thackeray's "Henry Esmond," "The Newcomes" and "The Virginians"; Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," "Harold," "Rienzi" and "The Last of the barons"; Charles Kingsley's "Westward Ho," "Hereward the Wake" and "Hypatia"; Charles Reade's "Cloister and the hearth," "Peg Woffington," "Foul play" and "Put yourself in his place"; Besant's "All sorts and conditions of men" and "The Children of Gibeon"; Wilkie Collins' "The Moonstone" and "The Woman in white" as many of Robert Louis Stevenson's stories as will be read "Cranford" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" with the Hugh Thomson illustrations; Miss Mulock's "John Halifax," "A Noble life," "A Brave lady" and "A Life for a life"; Lever's "Charles O'Malley" and "Harry Lorrequer", Lew Wallace's "Ben Hur" and "The Fair god"; Stockton's "Rudder Grange," "The Casting away of Mrs.
Her conception of the Emerald Isle, founded on Lover's ballads and Lever's romances, was completely realized. "How haunting!" said she, in a hushed whisper. "What a pity to go any further, and be disenchanted, perhaps!" "I wish," said Mr.
"I have a faint impression," he said, "that you will find something very much like that in one of Lever's novels." But later I thought, "Even so, what then? Good stories repeat themselves."
In those days things were not so impecunious in Ireland as they subsequently became, but there was always a vivacious Hibernian scorn for false pretension, and a determination to have the best possible time, such as you can read in Lever's novels of old, and the capital tales of those two clever ladies, Miss Martin and Miss Somerville, to-day.
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