Level should be Comparable<Level>. Otherwise when you try to see whether one Level is more severe than other, you wind up needing to do an integer comparison on intValue; e.g.:

http://hg.netbeans.org/main-silver/file/4d394a5c7c7a/nbjunit/src/org/netbeans/junit/NbModuleLogHandler.java

if (msg.intValue() <= record.getLevel().intValue()) ...