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especially the first two, were made up to a great extent of experiences through which Lever had gone, or stories which he had heard in Ireland, and of the reminiscences and oddities of English residents at Brussels, where there were then many retired English officers who had gone through the Peninsular and other campaigns of the great war. It is said in particular that Major Monsoon was almost a photograph of a well-known living character at the time, and much the same thing has been asserted of other personages. This piecing together of scraps accounts for the incoherency and absence of plot in the earlier books – defects which were increased by the author's habit of composing them in fragments, and revising them for the press with the utmost carelessness. The abundance and variety of his materials, however, his skill as a raconteur, and the fresh and almost boisterous good humour which blew through all his work, made him very popular, and he found a congenial illustrator in H. K. Browne. After a time proposals were made to him to undertake the editorship of the Dublin University Magazine, which he accepted, and held the post from 1842 to 1845. During this time his income was considerable, amounting, according to his biographer, to fully three thousand a year. He lived not in Dublin but a little way out of it, and exercised boundless hospitality to visitors. Besides this, he was an inveterate card player, and not on the whole a lucky one, and he was very fond of horses, which he kept in large numbers for himself and all his family. He was indefatigable in novel writing, Tom Burke, The O'Donoghue, The Knight of Gwynne, &c., following those already named. But the work of editing was irksome to him, and for the reasons just named residence in Ireland made it comparatively unprofitable. He therefore resigned his editorship in the year 1845, and went abroad, where he was always more at home than in England or even in Ireland. At first he lived at Carlsruhe, where G. P. R. James was also residing; then he pitched his tent in a castle of Tyrol, which is said to be pretty accurately described in A Day's Ride. Afterwards he wandered about, finally settling at Florence. This neighbourhood became specially agreeable to him, uniting as it did abundant society with the possibility of enjoying it without great expense. In November 1858 he received from Lord Derby one of the rare pieces of patronage which have fallen in modern days to the share of Englishmen of letters, by being appointed consul at Spezzia. During this period of wandering or settled life on the Continent, he changed his style of novel writing. His method was, as has been hinted already, always one rather of observation and reproduction than of deliberate creation, and as he had formerly drawn on the humours of Irish life, or the oddities of Wellington's veterans, so now he dealt with those of travelling Britons abroad, and with similar subjects. The Daltons, The Dodd Family Abroad, Davenport Dunn, &c., belong to this time and family for the most part, though some of them rather fall under the earlier class in style and date of composition. One of Them, Barrington, The Fortunes of Glencore, &c., led up to the most singular of all Lever's books, A Day's Ride, a Life's Romance. This book, which was published in All the Year Round, was said at the time – with what truth it is not easy to say – to have positively lowered the sale of that publication, yet it contains some of Lever's best work, and displays an originality not common with him. The mixture of burlesque and sentiment was, it may be supposed, either uncongenial or incomprehensible to the ordinary reader.
As he grew older, Lever, whose politics had been a rather indefinite Toryism, became more of a party man, and showed this in the papers published in Blackwood's Magazine, under the name of "Cornelius O'Dowd," papers of a miscellaneous kind, but often political. He is said to have thought of engaging, or to have been invited to engage, in regular journalism, but wisely declined. In 1867 he was transferred from Spezzia to Trieste, a change pecuniarily advantageous, but involving the loss of the society which he passionately loved. The last years of Lever's life were somewhat clouded. His health had never been good, and he had not lived carefully. His wife, to whom he was much attached, died before him. But he was still active with his pen, and the novels of his last period, if less lively than his earlier ones, are far better written as well as far more regular and careful in construction. Such are Sir Brooke Fosbrooke, That Boy of Norcott's, Sir Jasper Carew, The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly, and his last book, Lord Kilgobbin. He died, as has been said, in the summer of 1872. Novels not yet mentioned are Roland Cashel, Luttrell of Arran, Tony Butler, Maurice Tiernay, the Martins of Cro' Martin, St Patrick's Eve, &c.
Lever deserves an honourable place among the secondary novelists of the 19th century, but it is not very probable that any single novel of his will have a long lease of popularity. He is one of the authors who do not take the trouble to learn the mechanism of their art until the heyday of their imaginative force is past. The defects of his earlier works have been already indicated. They are written with almost inconceivable carelessness, the same incidents occurring over and over again, and the chronology being altogether bewildering. This is especially the case with Charles O'Malley, which, however, owing to the liveliness of its adventures and the personage of Mickey Free the Irish servant, is still perhaps the most popular of all. With young and uncritical readers this popularity is likely to be maintained until some supplanter in the same kind arises, or until the state of manners and society becomes too obsolete for any thing more than historical interest. Then Lever, like all writers whose formal excellence is not sufficient to save them, will be forgotten; for his later work, though almost always amusing and sometimes more, has little abiding interest. The sole authority for Lever's biography is the Life by Dr W. J. Fitzgerald (London, 1879). (G. SA.)
LEVERRIER, Urbain Jean Joseph (1811-1877), one of the greatest astronomers of modern times, was born at St Lô in Normandy, March 11, 1811. His father, who held a small post under Government, made great efforts to send him to Paris, where a brilliant examination gained him, in 1831, admittance to the École Polytechnique. The distinction of his career there was rewarded with a free choice amongst the departments of the public service open to pupils of the school. He selected the administration of tobaccos, addressing himself especially to chemical researches under the guidance of Gay-Lussac, and gave striking proof of ability in two papers on the combinations of phosphorus with hydrogen and oxygen, published in Annales de Chimie et de Physique (1835 and 1837). His astronomical vocation, like that of Kepler, came from without. The place of teacher of that science at the École Polytechnique falling vacant in 1837, it was offered to and accepted by Leverrier, who, "docile to circumstance," instantly abandoned chemistry, and directed the whole of his powers to celestial mechanics. The first fruits of his arduous labours were contained in two memoirs presented to the Academy, September 16 and October 14, 1839. Pursuing the investigations of Laplace, he demonstrated with greater rigour the stability of the solar system, and calculated the limits within which the eccentricities and inclinations of the planetary orbits vary. This remarkable début excited much attention, and, on the recommendation of Arago, he took in hand the theory of Mercury, producing, in 1843, tables of that planet far superior in accuracy to those hitherto available. The perturbations of the comets discovered, the one by Faye in November 1843, the other by De Vico a year later, were minutely investigated by Leverrier, with the result of disproving the supposed identity of the first with Lexell's lost comet of 1770, and of the other with Tycho's of 1585. On the other hand, he made it appear all but certain that Vico's comet was the same with one seen by Lahire in 1678.
