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Rh romance of Killarney, owed its existence to a holiday spent in that district; in the next, ‘The Knight of Gwynne,’ 1847, one of his best books, he fell back upon history, and availed himself of contemporary memoirs of the union.

Thackeray visited Lever on his own Irish tour in 1842–3, and dedicated to him his ‘Irish Sketch Book.’ He frankly warned him against his literary tendency to extravagance, and in personal intercourse strongly advised him to quit Dublin for London. Lever, however, preferred the continent. In 1845 he resigned his editorship, and in May was living at Brussels, reduced, he says, to his last fifty pounds, but still apparently driving about with his carriage and pair. After wandering for two years with his family over Germany and Italy, and doing little work except desultory writing for magazines, he settled at Florence in August 1847. There he produced ‘The Martins of Cro' Martin,’ a fine picture of West of Ireland life; ‘Roland Cashel,’ 1850, the materials for which were partly drawn from his continental experience, and which especially illustrates the transition from his earlier to his later style; and ‘The Dodd Family Abroad,’ 1853–4, a picture of English life on the continent in which he appears more in the light of a reflective humourist than previously, and which, he says, was better liked by himself and his intimate friends, and less liked by the public, than any of his books. These works may be said to mark Lever's culmination as a novelist. To the same period belong ‘Tales of the Trains by Tilbury Tramp,’ ‘Diary and Notes of Horace Templeton,’ 1849, ‘Con Cregan,’ 1849 (published anonymously, and welcomed by the press as the production of a formidable competitor), ‘Maurice Tiernay,’ 1852, ‘Sir Jasper Carew,’ 1854, and ‘The Daltons,’ 1852. ‘A Day's Ride,’ published in ‘Household Words,’ and separately in 1863, was so unsuccessful that Dickens adopted the unusual course of announcing beforehand the number with which it would terminate.

In 1857 Lever was appointed British consul at Spezzia, an office which compelled him to live there, but which seems to have been otherwise almost a sinecure. His principal literary performances during his residence were: ‘The Fortunes of Glencore,’ 1857; ‘Davenport Dunn,’ 1859; ‘One of them,’ 1861; ‘Barrington,’ 1862; ‘Tony Butler,’ 1865; ‘A Campaigner at Home,’ 1865; ‘Luttrell of Arran,’ 1865; and ‘Sir Brook Fosbrooke,’ 1866, his own favourite among his novels, but not remarkably popular. ‘Cornelius O'Dowd upon Men, Women, and other things in general,’ 1864, a series of essays, originally appeared in ‘Blackwood,’ and obtained considerably more success than it deserved. It shows the man of experience and observation, but is in general such table-talk as one need not go far to hear, deficient in originality, pregnancy, and point. In 1867 he received the consulship of Trieste from Lord Derby, with the observation, ‘Here is six hundred a year for doing nothing, and you are just the man to do it.’ The increased salary scarcely atoned for the unsuitableness of the post. The climate and society of Trieste were detestable to Lever; his wife, to whom he was tenderly attached, sickened and died. He fell into confirmed bad spirits, though always able to rally under congenial circumstances—able, too, to produce a novel of considerable merit in his last fiction, ‘Lord Kilgobbin’ (1872). His other works of this period were: ‘Gerald Fitzgerald's Continental Gossippings;’ ‘The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly,’ 1868; ‘That Boy of Norcott's,’ 1869; ‘Paul Gosslett's Confession,’ 1870. He could not, however, shake off his depression, which was partly occasioned by incipient disease of the heart, partly by the fixed idea, which, when his relation to his great contemporaries is considered, cannot but appear most groundless, that he had been unfairly treated in comparison with others, and had been left behind in the race of life. He visited Ireland in 1871, and seemed alternately in very high and very low spirits; after his return to Trieste he failed gradually, and died suddenly there, from failure of the heart's action, on 1 June 1872. He had continued to lose at cards to the last, yet his affairs were in perfect order, and his family was not unprovided for.

A collected edition of his works in thirty-three volumes was issued between 1876 and 1878, and a reprint is now in course of publication. ‘The Commissioner, or De Lunatico Inquirendo,’ 1843, sometimes ascribed to Lever, is by G. P. R. James, although Lever contributed a preface. ‘The Nevilles of Garretstown,’ by the Rev. Mortimer O'Sullivan, is also wrongly associated with Lever's name, together with ‘The Mystic Vial,’ ‘The Heirs of Randolph Abbey,’ and ‘Major O'Connor, by the author of Charles O'Malley.’ ‘The Rent in a Cloud,’ 1869, though included in Lever's collected works, is believed to be by a daughter (cf. Notes and Queries, 7th ser. vi. 111–12).

Lever's novels, says Anthony Trollope in his ‘Autobiography’ (ii. 74–5), ‘are just like his conversation;’ and he adds: ‘Of all the men I have ever encountered, he was the surest fund of drollery. … Rouse him in the middle of the night, and wit would come from him before he was half awake.’ Lever's great misfortune was to be an author without