mostly artificial, the fond is sadness, as appears to me to be that of most Irish writing and people." The Waterloo episode in Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-1848) was in part an outcome of the talk between the two novelists. But the "Galway pace", the display he found it necessary to maintain at Templeogue, the stable full of horses, the cards, the friends to entertain, the quarrels to compose and the enormous rapidity with which he had to complete Tom Burke, The O'Donoghue and Arthur O'Leary (1845) made his native land an impossible place for Lever to continue in. Templeogue would soon have proved another Abbotsford. Thackeray suggested London, but Lever required a new field of literary observation and anecdote. His creative inspiration exhausted, he decided to renew it on the continent. In 1845 he resigned his editorship and went back to Brussels, whence he started upon an unlimited tour of central Europe in a family coach. Now and again he halted for a few months, and entertained to the limit of his resources in some ducal castle or other which he hired for an off-season. Thus at Riedenburg, near Bregenz, in August 1846, he entertained Charles Dickens and his wife and other well-known people. Dickens would later publish Lever's novel A Day's Ride in serial in his weekly journal All the Year Round, running parallel to Great Expectations for part of its run from 1860 to 1861. Like his own Daltons or Dodd Family Abroad he travelled continentally, from Karlsruhe to Como, from Como to Florence, from Florence to the Baths of Lucca and so on, and his letters home are the litany of the literary remittance-man, his ambition now limited to driving a pair of novels abreast without a diminution of his standard price for serial work ("twenty pounds a sheet"). In the Knight of Gwynne, a story of the Union (1847), The Confessions of Con Cregan (1849), Roland Cashel (1850) and Maurice Tiernay (1852) we still have traces of his old manner; but he was beginning to lose his original joy in composition. His innate 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. "After 38 or so what has life to offer but one universal declension. Let the crew pump as hard as