At home, Lever played similar tricks on his own parents, making up plausible but wholly fictitious items which he pretended to read from the newspaper. His imagination and ability to extemporize carried over into his writing career and made him popular socially as a raconteur all his life.
Lever entered Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of sixteen and took five years to earn his degree. It was while he was in college that he published his first writing: an essay an opium, "Recollections of the Night," appeared in a Cork quarterly in 1826.
After receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1827, Lever went to Canada, where he toured the frontier. He later used his adventures there--including a several-month stay with an Indian tribe--as the basis of incidents in his novels. The following year he went to Germany to study at Göttingen and Heidelberg, returning to Dublin via Vienna, Weimar (where he met Goethe), and Paris.
In Dublin, Lever studied medicine at Stevens Hospital and at Trinity College, where he started a German-type student club; he also contributed pieces to local periodicals.
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