A model of magnetic configurations that has both shear and variation of the field curvature along the magnetic field is constructed. The stability analysis of this system is performed by expanding the perturbation function in &fgr;0which is constant along the field and &fgr;1which varies sinusoidally along the field line. The shear term is retained in the form of differential operations in &xgr;, the coordinate parallel to the pressure gradient. After several simplifications, the equation reduces to a fourth‐order differential equation. The eigenvalue of this equation is obtained numerically. The calculated critical &bgr; plotted versus the well depth parameter,h, makes a smooth transition betweeenh<0 (maximum averageB) andh≳0 (minimum averageB). Using the same technique, the nondivergent solution to the localized shear mode (Suydam mode) is also obtained by retaining the inertia term.