morning; and there can be no doubt which set of hours was more
favourable to Lever's genius. Of course he liked "The Daltons"
best; of all people, authors appear to be their own worst critics.

It is not possible even to catalogue Lever's later books here.
Again he drove a pair of novels abreast--"The Dodds" and "Sir Jasper
Carew"--which contain some of his most powerful situations. When
almost an old man, sad, outworn in body, straitened in
circumstances, he still produced excellent tales in this later
manner--"Lord Kilgobbin," "That Boy of Norcott's," "A Day's Ride,"
and many more. These are the thoughts of a tired man of the world,
who has done and seen everything that such men see and do. He says
that he grew fat, and bald, and grave; he wrote for the grave and
the bald, not for the happier world which is young, and curly, and
merry. He died at last, it is said, in his sleep; and it is added
that he did what Harry Lorrequer would not have done--he left his
affairs in perfect order.

Lever lived in an age so full of great novelists that, perhaps, he
is not prized as he should be. Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray,
Trollope, George Eliot, were his contemporaries. But when we turn
back and read him once more, we see that Lever, too, was a worthy
member of that famous company--a romancer for boys and men.



THE POEMS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT