Lever's fond of sadness began to cloud the animal joyousness of his temperament. Formerly he had written for the happy world which is young and curly and merry; now he grew fat and bald and grave. But, depressed in spirit as he was, his wit was unextinguished; he was still the delight of the salons with his stories, and in 1867, after a few years' experience of a similar kind at Spezia, he was cheered by a letter from Lord Derby offer ing him the more lucrative consulship of Trieste. "Here is six hundred a year for doing nothing, and you are just the man to do it." The six hundred could not atone to Lever for the lassitude of p:olonged exile in a place he came to dislike heartily. He had unscrupulous friends who assured him that his last efforts were his best. They include The Fortunes of Glencore (1857), Tony Butler (1865), Luttrell of Arran (1865), Sir Brooke Fosbrooke (1866), Lord Kilgobbin (1872) and the table-talk of Cornelius O'Dowd, originally contributed to Blackwood. His depression, partly due to incipient heart disease, was confirmed by the death of his wife (April 23, 1870), to whom he was tenderly attached. He died at Trieste on June 1, 1872.
Trollope praised Lever's novels highly when he said that they were just like his conversation. He was a born raconteur, and had in perfection that easy flow of light description which without tedium or hurry leads up to the point of the good stories of which in earlier days his supply seemed inexhaustible. With little respect for unity of action or conventional novel structure, his brightest books, such as Lorrequer, O'Malley and Tom Burke, are in fact little more than recitals of scenes in the life of a particular "hero," unconnected by any continuous intrigue. The type of character he depicted is for the most part elementary. His women are mostly rouees, romps or Xanthippes; his heroes have too much of the Pickle temper about them and fall an easy prey to the serious attacks of Poe or to the more playful gibes of Thackeray in Phil Fogarty or Bret Harte in Terence Deuville.
This last is a perfect bit of burlesque. Terence exchanges 19 shots with the Hon. Captain Henry Somerset in the glen. "At each fire I shot away a button from his uniform. As my last bullet shot off the last button from his sleeve, I remarked quietly, `You seem now, my lord, to be almost as ragged as the gentry you sneered at,' and rode haughtily away." And yet these care less sketches contain such haunting creations as Frank Webber, Major Monsoon and Micky Free, "the Sam Weller of Ireland." Falstaff is alone in the literature of the world; but if ever there came a later Falstaff, Monsoon was the man. As for Baby Blake, is she not an Irish Di Vernon? The critics may praise Lever's thoughtful and careful later novels as they will, but Charles O'Malley will always be the pattern of a military romance.
The chief authorities are the Life, by W. J. Fitzpatrick (1879), and the Letters, ed. in 2 vols. by Edmund Downey (1906), neither of which, however, enables the reader to penetrate below the surface. See also Dr. Garnett in Dict. Nat. Biog.; Dublin Univ. Mag. (188o), 465 and 57o; Anthony Trollope's Autobiography (1883) ; Blackwood (Aug. 1862) ; Fortnightly Review, vol. xxxii.; Andrew Lang, Essays in Little (1892) ; W. E. Henley, Views and Reviews (1890) ; Hugh Walker, Literature of the Victorian Era (Iwo) ; The Bookman Hist. of English Literature (1906), p. 467; Bookntan (June 1906 ; portraits). A library edition of the novels in 37 vols. appeared 1897-99 under the superintendence of Lever's daughter, Julie Kate Neville. (T. S.; X.)