Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed, in Harry Lorrequer, a pretty distinct style of his own.  This style was a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat “promiscuous” plot and with lively but externally drawn characters—­the humours being furnished partly by Lever’s native country, Ireland, and partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels.  He had kept up this style, the capital example of which is Charles O’Malley (1840), with unabated verve and with great popular success for a dozen years before 1850.  But about that time, or rather earlier, the general “suck” of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made him change it into studies of a less specialised kind—­of foreign travel, home life, and the like—­sketches which, in his later days still, he brought even closer to actuality.  It is true that in the long run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the early “rollicking” adventure books:  not only because of their natural appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and hardly any of this particular thing anywhere.  To almost anybody, for instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction, Charles O’Malley with its love-making and its fighting, its horsemanship and its horse-play, its “devilled kidneys"[23] and its devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction.  But the fact of the author’s change remains not the less historically and symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in the work of Bulwer.  At the same time it has been pointed out that the following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the following of Scott:  and that the new development included “crosses” of novel and romance, sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the highest, or all but the highest, interest.  Early and good examples of these may be found in the work of the Brontes, Charlotte and Emily (the third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of Charles Kingsley.  Charlotte (b. 1816) and Charles (b. 1819) were separated in their birth by but three years, Emily (b. 1818) and Kingsley by but one.

    [23] Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic
    explosion at the prominence of these agreeable viands in the
    book.