the
full blaze and fame of that great victory.' Could he have repeated it
had he lived? Who knows? In both these irresistible appeals to the
heart of man the material is of equal value and importance with the form;
and in poetry such material is rare. A brace of such songs is possible
to a poet; ten couples are not. It is Hood's immortality that he sang
these two. Almost in the uttering they went the round of the world; and
it is not too much to say of them that they will only pass with the
language.

LEVER

How He Lived.

The story of Lever's life and adventures only wants telling to be as
irresistibly attractive as Lorrequer's or O'Malley's own. Born in
Dublin, of an English father and an Irish mother, he lived to be
essentially cosmopolitan and a _viveur_ of the first magnitude. At eight
he was master of his schoolmaster--a gentleman given to flogging but not
learned in Greek, and therefore a proper subject for a certain sort of
blackmailing. He was not an industrious boy; but he was apt and ready
with his tongue, he was an expert in fencing and the dance, he was good
at improvising and telling stories, it is on record that he pleaded and
won the cause of himself and certain of his schoolmates accused before a
magistrate of riot and outrage. At college he found work for his high
spirits in wild fun and the perpetration of practical jokes. He and his
chum Ottiwell, the original of Frank Webber, behaved to their governors,
teachers, and companions very much as Charles O'Malley and the
redoubtable Frank behave to theirs. Lever was excellent at a
street-ballad, and made and sang them in the rags of Rhoudlim, just as
Frank Webber does; and he personated Cusack the surgeon to Cusack's
class, just as Frank Webber personates the dean to _his_ class. On the
whole, indeed, he must have been as gamesome and volatile a nuisance as
even Dublin has endured. On leaving college he took charge of an
emigrant ship bound for Quebec. Arrived in Canada, he plunged into the
backwoods, was affiliated to a tribe of Indians, and had to escape like
Bagenal Daly at the risk of his life. Then he went to Germany, became a
student at Gottingen under Blumenbach, was heart and soul a Bursch, and
had the honour of seeing Goethe at Weimar. His diploma gained, he went
to Clare to do battle with the cholera and gather materials for _Harry
Lorrequer_. After this he was for some time dispensary doctor at
Portstewart, where