ible, and Mr. Symington has done well to embody his
Loveriana in a short life of the Irish humorist. The new material
brought forth is slender, consisting simply of a few letters and ten
short poems, not of his best; but it was worth publishing, and Mr.
Symington has the advantage, in treating of Lover, of writing from
personal knowledge. He has rather slurred over the earlier part of
Lover's career, apparently from a fear of trespassing on the preserves
of a longer biography previously published; which is a pity, as his
sketch will have most interest for readers who come fresh to the
subject. Even those whose curiosity in regard to the writer has not
been stirred by reading his works may get a very good idea of them from
the selections printed here. The book is not a critical study: it
enters into no details or analysis of Lover's character. It is simply a
hurried outline of his life, interspersed with songs and stories which
go a good way to make up for the meagreness of personal anecdote, and
ending with some friendly letters and short notes written by Lover
during the last few years of his life and addressed to Mr. Symington.
Most of these letters were written in poor health from the Isle of
Wight or Jersey, to which places he was sent by the doctors. They are
not of the brilliant or gossipy order, but they are admirable in their
good colloquial English and cheerful, unaffected style. Lover was a man
of great activity of mind, combined with warm affections. His
life-story was not very romantic, but it was a wholesome and pleasant
one. When young he was deeply attached to an English girl, with whom,
though they were separated (Mr. Symington does not say from what
cause), he maintained through life a warm friendship. The young lady
married, and Lover consoled himself and was married twice, each time,
it appears, very happily. His letters contain many little domestic
allusions, reporting his own occupations and those of "the good little
wife" at their fireside in Kent or away at the shore, where they look
back with regret to their own country-house. Lover had a warm
attachment to home, the house as well as the inmates. "I cannot tell
you," he writes from the Isle of Wight, "how much I have been put off
my balance by my exile from my own house. For a time one is willing to
make, for health's sake, a sacrifice of domestic comfort and give up
the pleasant habits one can indulge in in one's own home; but to lead
for months