, preserving a record of conditions material and
spiritual, which happily have largely ceased to exist, yet operate
indefinitely as causes among us, producing eternal though eternally
modifiable effects.

But, for the things in human nature that are neither of yesterday,
to-day, nor to-morrow, but unchangeable, he has the humorist's true
touch. When the poor scholar is departing, and has actually torn himself
away from home, his mother runs after him with a last token--a small
bottle of holy water. "Jimmy, alanna," said she, "here's this an' carry
it about you--it will keep evil from you; an' be sure to take good care
of the written characther you got from the priest an' Squire Benson;
an', darlin', don't be lookin' too often at the cuff o' your coat, for
feard the people might get a notion that you have the banknotes sewed in
it. An', Jimmy agra, don't be too lavish upon their Munsther crame; they
say 'tis apt to give people the ague. Kiss me agin, agra, an' the
heavens above keep you safe and well till we see you once more."

Through all that catalogue of precautions, divine and human, one feels
the mood between tears and laughter of the man who set it down. But I
think you only come to the truth about Carleton in the last scene of
all, when Jimmy returns to his home, a priest. Nothing could be more
stilted, more laboured, than the pages which attempt to render his
emotions and his words, till there comes the revealing touch. His mother
at sight of him, returned unlooked-for after the long absence, loses for
a moment the possession of her faculties, and cannot be restored. At
last, "I will speak to her," said Jimmy, "in Irish; it will go directly
to her heart." And it does.

Carleton never could speak to us in Irish; the English was still a
strange tongue on his lips and in the ears of those he lived among; and
his work comes down distracted between the two languages, imperfect and
halting, only with flashes of true and living speech.

When you come to Lever, it is a very different story. Lever was at no
lack for utterance; nobody was ever more voluble, no one ever less
inclined to sit and bite his pen, waiting for the one and only word.
Good or bad, he could be trusted to rattle on; and, as Trollope said, if
you pulled him out of bed and demanded something witty, he would flash
it at you before he was half awake. Some people are born with the
perilous gift of improvisation; and the best that can be said for Lever