He made up his mind to bid good-bye to Templeogue,--“to seek out a tranquil place in a foreign land,” he writes, “and to work away among my children”; and in February 1845 he set out once more for Brussels, Mr Pearce accompanying him.
It was whispered at the time of his departure that he was in serious money difficulties, but two of his intimate Mends, Judge Longfield and Major Dwyer, vouch that when leaving Ireland he left no debt behind him. Lever’s own statement to Canon Hayman was that Dublin people were telling one another he was about to take “French leave.” “The truth is,” he continued, “I came to Dublin so poor a man that I cannot be much poorer leaving it. But no one suffers by my poverty, except me and mine.” Though he ceased to be the editor of ‘The Dublin University’ he did not sever his connection with the Magazine until a much later period.
* The average circulation of the Magazine (which, it must be remembered, was published at half-a-crown) was 4000 during Lever’s editorship. The circulation gradually fell away, and early in the ‘Eighties the periodical died.--E. D.
And here, as we see the last of Charles Lever as a resident on Irish soil, it may be suggested that it has been the fashion to contemplate his novels which have Irishmen for their heroes--‘Harry Lorrequer’ being rather a series of stories of desultory adventures than an ordinary novel--from points of view which indicate some obliquity or narrowness of vision. In Great Britain Lever is recognised merely as the humorsome delineator of the rollicking, mule-cart-topping, bullet-proof dragoon: in Ireland he is regarded by a considerable section of his countrymen as a farce-writer, or else as that abomination, the Anti-Irish Irishman.** Many of his critics--English, Irish, American--assert that his sketches of Hibernian life are hopelessly out of drawing, that his gross exaggeration smudges the picture. William Carle-ton went so far as to accuse him of deliberately giving to the public “disgusting and debasing caricatures” of Irish life and character. This class of criticism is born either of ignorance or of jealousy or of crassness.
** Some of his Irish traducers--meaning to be scornful-- speak of him as an Englishman, and imply that he was unable to view men and affairs with an Irish eye. Thomas Davis, like Lever, was the son of an English father and of a mother who was of Cromwellian-Irish stock, yet no Irishman dreams of referring to Davis as “a foreigner.”--E. D.