The memory of so genial and popular a writer as Lover ought to be kept as green as possible, 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 and months a lodging-house life is very miserable:  it benumbs the best of our faculties; the edge of enjoyment is blunted.  Music is sweeter within the compass of your own walls; the book is pleasanter taken from the familiar shelf of your own library; in one’s own studio the habit of happy occupation has made an atmosphere that has a charm in it.”