Billy Traynor, “poet, peddler, and physician” (_The Fortunes of Glencore_), we have a type of the medical men with whom he was then associated. “I am the nearest thing to a doctor going,” says Billy. “I can breathe a vein against any man in the barony. I can’t say that for any articular congestion of the aortis valve, or for a seropulmonic diathesis, d’ye mind, that there isn’t as good as me; but for the ould school of physic, the humoral diagnostic touch, who can beat me?” The hedge-doctor and hedge-schoolmaster, pedants both, are now an institution of the past. Charles Lever, however, was not destined to blush unseen or waste his sweetness on a country practice. Appointed to the Legation at Brussels, he bounded from the dreary drudgery of a dispensary to the glittering gayety of an embassy, from the hideous squalor of the fever-reeking cabin to the coquettish gravity of the palatial sick-room. In “Belgium’s capital” the _cacoethes scribendi_ seized him, and the result was _Harry Lorrequer_. He awoke, and, like Lord Byron, found himself famous. The distinct portraiture, the brilliant style, the thoroughly Hibernian _ensemble_, claimed a well-merited success for the book, and, written at the right moment—how many good works have perished by being floated on an ebb tide!—the public, who had hitherto accepted Ireland through the clever but trashy effusions of Lady Morgan, and the more genuine metal of Maria Edgeworth and Samuel Lover, joyously turned towards the rising sun, and, seizing upon this genuine bit of shillelah, clamorously demanded a fresh sprig from the same tree. The wild dash, as exhilarating as “mountain dew,” the breezy freshness, the gay _abandon_ of society and soldiering, the “moving accidents by flood and field,” acted upon the jaded palates of the British public like a tonic, and _Harry Lorrequer_, instead of being treated as an _entrée_, became respected as the _pièce de résistance_. Harry’s appearance on parade with the Othello blacking still upon his face; Miss Betty O’Dowd’s visit to Callonby on the “low-backed car”; her desire of disowning the nondescript vehicle, and its being announced by her shock-headed retainer as “the thing _you know_ is at the doore”; the description of boarding-house life in Dublin sixty years ago; Mrs. Clanfrizzle’s, in Molesworth Street—the establishment is still in existence, and may be recognized in Lisle House; the “amateur hotel,” so graphically described by Mr. Lever; the picture of “dear, dirty Dublin” itself: “Oh! Dublin, sure there is no doubtin’, Beats every city upon the say; ’Tis there you’ll see O’Connell spoutin’ And Lady Morgan making tay”; a night at Howth; the Knight of Kerry and Billy McCabe—form a succession of sketches teeming with vivacity, humor, and wit, and dashed off with a pen which almost makes a steeplechaser of the reader, so exciting and so rapid is the pace.