Lever had met William Hamilton Maxwell, the titular founder of the genre. Before Harry Lorrequer appeared in volume form (1839), Lever had settled - on the strength of a slight diplomatic connection - as a fashionable physician in Brussels (Hertogstraat 16). Lorrequer was merely a string of Irish and other stories - good, bad and indifferent, but mostly rollicking. Lever, who strung together his anecdotes late at night after the serious business of his day, was astonished at its success. "If this sort of thing amuses them, I can go on for ever." Brussels was indeed a superb place for the observation of half-pay officers, such as Major Monsoon (Commissioner Meade), Captain Bubbleton and the like, who terrorised the taverns of the place with their endless Peninsular stories, and of English society a little damaged, which it became the speciality of Lever to depict. He sketched with a free hand, wrote, as he lived, from hand to mouth, and the chief difficulty he experienced was that of getting rid of his characters who "hung about him like those tiresome people who never can make up their minds to bid you good night". Lever had never taken part in a battle himself, but his next three books, Charles O'Malley (1841), Jack Hinton (1843), and Tom Burke of Ours (1844), written under the spur of the writer's chronic extravagance, contain some splendid military writing and some of the most animated battle-pieces on record. In pages of O'Malley and Tom Burke Lever anticipates not a few of the best effects of Marbot, Thibaut, Lejeune, Griois, Seruzier, Burgoyne and the like. His account of the Douro need hardly fear comparison, it has been said, with Napier's. Condemned by the critics, Lever had completely won the general reader - from the Iron Duke himself downwards. In 1842 he returned to Dublin to edit the Dublin University Magazine, and gathered round him a typical coterie of Irish wits (including one or two hornets) such as the O'Suilivans, Archer Butler, William Carleton, Sir William Wilde, Canon Hayman, DF McCarthy, McGlashan, Dr Kencaly and many others. In June 1842 he welcomed at Templeogue, four miles southwest of Dublin, the author of the Snob Papers on his Irish tour (the Sketch Book was, later, dedicated to Lever). Thackeray recognised the fund of Irish sadness beneath the surface merriment. "The author's character is not humour but sentiment. The spirits are