The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 11. Lever
Charles Lever, as a young man, sat at Maxwell’s feet, but soon surpassed his master in popularity as a writer of the new form of fiction originated by Maginn. He, too, was educated at Trinity college, Dublin, and took a medical degree there and at Louvain, but practised the healing art far more effectively than Goldsmith. Most of his earlier work, like that of Maxwell, appeared in The Dublin University Magazine, which he edited when it was in its prime, and, here, his spirited and brilliant, if somewhat rough and ready, military novels first saw the light. In his later years, when he was consul at Trieste, his more finished, if less popular, works, Cornelius O’Dowd and Lord Kilgobbin, a novel of Fenian times, appeared. In verse as in prose, Lever has a lighter and more human touch than Maginn, without his masterfulness of style. But he does not escape from the somewhat selfish atmosphere in which the hard-drinking, hard-riding squires and squireens of his day had their being.