sufficient literary vocation. Had his circumstances been easy, he probably would not have written at all. His earliest and most popular writings can hardly rank as literature, though their vigour and gaiety, and the excellent anecdotes and spirited songs with which they are interspersed, will always render them attractive. He is almost destitute of invention or imagination, his personages are generally transcripts from the life, and his incidents stories told at second hand. At a later period in his career he awoke in some measure to the claims of art, and exhibited more proficiency as a writer, with less damage to his character as a humorist, than might have been expected. The transition is marked by ‘Roland Cashel,’ but in ‘Glencore’ he first deliberately attempted analysis of character. His readers lamented the disappearance of his rollicking spendthrifts and daredevil heroes. But his later works exhibit fewer traces of exhaustion and decay than is usual with veteran writers. The effervescence of animal spirits has indeed subsided, but the residue is by no means tame or spiritless, and the loss of energy is largely compensated by greater attention to finish, and to the regularity of construction essential to the novel. Lever's best passages of incident and description in both his early and late novels are very effective; his diffuseness, which seldom amounts to tediousness, may be excused as the result of serial publication. He had so little of the artistic instinct that he could not, he tells us, write otherwise than from month to month.
For his military novels, like ‘Maurice Tiernay’ and ‘Tom Burke’—by many accounted his best work—he derived much information from ‘Victoires, conquêtes, désastres … des Français de 1792 à 1819’ (15 vols. 1835). ‘Tom Burke’ is especially valuable for its portrayal of the enthusiasm excited by Napoleon I, and of the life of the Irish exiles in Paris, which Miles Byrne depicted historically in his ‘Memoirs’ (1863). As a portrayer of Irish character Lever has been greatly overrated. His friend Major Dwyer justly observes that his aboriginal Irishmen are generally of a low class, his heroes and heroines almost invariably English or Anglo-Norman. He has done much to perpetuate current errors as to Irish character, not that the type which he depicts is unreal, but it is far from universal or even general. Instead, therefore, of taking rank as Ireland's chief humorist, he is positively unpopular with Irishmen of strong national feeling, who accuse him of lowering the national character. He has not, however, actually misrepresented anything, and cannot be censured for confining himself to the society which he knew; nor was his talent adapted for the treatment of Irish life in its melancholy and poetical aspects, even if these had been more familiar to him. In his own character he exhibited some admirable and many amiable traits. His failings were chiefly those incidental to the sanguine temperament, of which, alike in its merits and defects, he was a singularly unmixed example.
Lever's characteristic extravagances are cleverly parodied by Bret Harte in his tale by ‘a popular author’ entitled ‘Terence Deuville.’
[The chief authority for Lever's Life is the Biography by W. J. Fitzpatrick, 1879; see also Webb's Compendium of Irish Biography; and Read's Irish Cabinet; for his early life see also two papers on ‘The Youth of Charles Lever,’ by a kinsman, Dublin Univ. Mag. 1880, pp. 465, 570. His novels are reviewed in Blackwood for August 1862; and his general literary character is rather severely estimated by Professor Saintsbury in the Fortnightly Review, vol. xxxii.]
LEVER, CHRISTOPHER (fl. 1627), protestant writer and poet, was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, but did not graduate (Cooper, Memorials of Cambridge, ii. 39). From the dedications of his various works it appears that though he had taken orders he was unable to obtain a benefice. He wrote: 1. ‘Queene Elizabeth's Teares; or, her resolute bearing the Christian Crosse inflicted on her by the persecuting hands of Steuen Gardner, Bishop of Winchester, in the bloodie time of Queene Marie,’ 4to, London, 1607, a curious but long and dull poem. 2. ‘A Crucifixe; or, a Meditation upon Repentance and the Holie Passion,’ 4to, London, 1607, another poem of the same mediocre quality. Reprinted by the Rev. A. B. Grosart in the ‘Fuller Worthies Library,’ 1870. 3. ‘Heaven and Earth, Religion and Policy; or the maine difference betweene Religion and Policy,’ 8vo [London], 1608. 4. ‘The Holy Pilgrime, leading the way to heaven … In two bookes. Written by C. L.,’ 8vo, London, 1618. 5. ‘The Historie of the Defendors of the Catholique Faith. Discoursing the state of Religion in England,’ &c., 4to, London, 1627. Copies of all these works are in the British Museum.
[Corser's Collectanea (Chetham Soc.), viii. 355–62; Hunter's Chorus Vatum (Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 24, 491), v. 182; Lever's Works.]
LEVER, DARCY (1760?–1837), writer on seamanship, born about 1760, was the eldest son of the Rev. John Lever of Buxton in Derbyshire, and nephew of Sir Ashton Lever [q. v.] In January 1770 he was entered in the Manchester school. He afterwards
