is a sort of fellow that comes into your room and keeps you roaring with laughter for a couple of hours every hour of the day.... His fun is something wonderful.” Every likely attraction was provided for O’Dowd by his publisher. Hannay, Kinglake, Delane did their best to entertain him. Blackwood describes the contrast between Kinglake and Lever,--the former making neat little remarks, and Lever rattling on with story after story. Harry Lorrequer appeared in the Park, riding on a nag of Lord Bolingbroke’s. Blackwood humorously declares that, seeing a donkey-cart in Piccadilly, he was uneasy lest the author of ‘Charles O’Malley’ should be tempted to clear the cart in a flying leap. The novelist’s own impressions of this visit to London were sufficiently lively. He was entertained by Lord Houghton, Lord Lytton, and other literary big-wigs. The city seemed as new to him--“just as noisy, as confounding, as addling, as exciting, as tantalising, as never satisfying”--as when he had first seen it. London loungers, he said, had no idea of the overwhelming excitement produced on an idle Anglo-Italian by the mere sounds and sights of the streets, nor could they measure the confusion and enjoyment experienced by a man “who hears more in half an hour than he has imagined in half a year.” He returned to Florence in June, visiting Paris on the homeward journey. He was not sorry to find that official duties called him to Spezzia. He was anxious for a period of rumination--for an easy opportunity of sliding back into the routine ways of pen-craft, which were, he declares, the labour and the happiness of his life. For some weeks consular work kept him busy, and it was difficult to make much headway with ‘Sir Brook.’ Moreover, he was beginning to suffer from attacks of somnolency, akin to the attacks which had prostrated him at Templeogue. When he was not sleeping he was frequently enwrapped in a half dream. “I reflect much,” he said, “and always with my eyes closed and a pillow under my head, and with such a semblance of perfect repose that calumnious people have said I was asleep. These hours of reflection occupy a large share of the forenoon and of the time between early dinner and sunset. They are periods of great enjoyment: they once were even more so, when an opinion prevailed that it would be a sacrilege to disturb me, these being the creative hours of my active intelligence. This faith has long since changed for a less reverent version of my labours, and people are less scrupulous about interruption.” One cannot help suspecting that opium played some part in this languorousness,--though there is no evidence that he resumed the habit. It would have been impossible that Lever should allow even his slumber-fits to escape from association with some form of frolic. Attired in a negligently-worn linen suit, he fell asleep on a chair one day at the public baths. An English footman came into the