* Baron Lendrick (in ‘Sir Brook Fossbrooke’) was one of Lever’s favourite characters. The old judge was a sketch for which he had to depend upon a memory of a journey made more than twenty years before ‘Sir Brook’ was written. Lever had travelled to London in the ‘Forties with a distinguished party--Isaac Butt, Frederick Shaw (the member for Dublin University), Henry West (afterwards a judge), and Sergeant Lefroy (afterwards--Lord Chief-Justice of Ireland). Baron Lendrick was a study of Lefroy. It was said that Lever was the only man who had ever succeeded in making Lefroy laugh. Lever declared that his Baron Lendrick was a portrait upon which he had expended “a good deal of time and paint”--E. D. “I send you a batch of O’Ds. for April No. Some of them I think good. By the way, Smith--of Smith & Elder--has been begging me to send him something, as O’Ds. I refused, and said that Cornelius was your property, and if I sent him an occasional squib it should be on no account under that title. “From what I have seen I agree with you about the style and pretensions of the ‘P. M. Gazette.’ They are heavy when trying to be light and volatile, the dreariest sort of failure imaginable. It is strange fact that what the world regards as the inferior organisation--the temperament for drollery--is infinitely the most difficult to imitate. Your clown might possibly play Hamlet. I’ll be shot if Hamlet could play Clown! Now original matter on daily events, to be read at all, ought to have the stamp of originality on its style. These fellows have not caught this. They are as tiresome as real members of Parliament. “There is a great dearth of ‘passing topics’ for O’Dowderie; Parliament is dull, and society duller. I am sure that a little stupidity--a sort of prosy platitude just now in O’D.--would conciliate my critics of the press. My pickles have given them a heartburn, d------ them; but they shall have them hotter than ever.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “_Feb_. 29, 1866. “I have just got your note and its ‘farce’: thanks for both. ‘Tony Butler’ is a deal too good for the stupid public, who cram themselves with [ ] and [ ], which any one with a Newgate Calendar at hand and an unblushing temperament might accomplish after a few easy lessons. “It is very little short of an indignity for a man to write for a public who can gloat over [ ] or the stupid drolleries of [ ], so flauntingly proclaimed by ‘The Times,’ as most utter trash. I am decidedly sick of my readers and my critics, and not in any extravagance of self-conceit, because though I know I have a speciality for the thing I do, I neither want any one to believe it a high order of performance or myself a very great artist. I only say it is mine, and that another has not done it in the same way.