rd has been a record of almost uninterrupted failure; there have
since, if not before, _Pendennis_ been several "press" novels, and their
record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success. But the
employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial _parts_ of
a novel was a success pure and unmixed. So, in the earlier book, the
same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest
painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy
like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic _drame_ of the most
exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne's relations with Becky,
or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious and rather
hardly treated little person.

Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above took--not of course
always, often, or perhaps ever in conscious following of Thackeray, but
in consequence of the same "skiey influences" which worked on him--to
this mixed domestic-dramatic line. And what is still more interesting,
men who had already made their mark for years, in styles quite
different, turned to it and adopted it. We have seen this of Bulwer, and
the evidences of the change in him which are given by the "Caxton"
novels. We have not yet directly dealt with another instance of almost
as great interest and distinction, Charles Lever, though we have named
him and glanced at his work.

Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to
write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed,
in _Harry Lorrequer_, a pretty distinct style of his own. This style was
a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat
"promiscuous" plot and with lively but externally drawn characters--the
humours being furnished partly by Lever's native country, Ireland, and
partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a
store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels. He had
kept up this style, the capital example of which is _Charles O'Malley_
(1840), with unabated _verve_ and with great popular success for a dozen
years before 1850. But about that time, or rather earlier, the general
"suck" of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the
feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made
him change it into studies of a less specialised kind--of foreign
travel, home life, and the like--sketches which, in his later days
still, he brou