He is brought to live at last with his old mother in the Fleet prison, on a wretched annuity of fifty pounds per annum, which she has saved out of the general wreck, and there he dies of delirium tremens.

For an assumed tone of continued irony, maintained through the long memoir of a life, never becoming tedious, never unnatural, astounding us rather by its naturalness, I know nothing equal to _Barry Lyndon_.
As one reads, one sometimes is struck by a conviction that this or the other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged.

There is a gusto about his passages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written.

He has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or doubt; and the words have come readily to him.

So it has been with _Barry Lyndon_.