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.