TROLLOPE’s London course, literary and social, began, as has been already shown, under Thackeray’s ægis. To the first editor of The Cornhill he owed his place in the set with which he soon became, and always remained, a favourite, as well as his earliest profitable connection with periodical letters. Naturally and properly Trollope repaid this debt to the utmost of his power, not only by every possible acknowledgment of lasting gratitude, but by the occasional compliment of literary imitation. The novels of English country life contributed by him to The Cornhill—Framley Parsonage in 1860, and The Small House at Allington that began to follow it in 1862, the year before Thackeray’s death—showed no sign of Thackeray’s influence. These were the two books that completed the process, begun by The Warden in 1855, of placing permanently the public he by this time understood beneath the spell of his pen. Before, however, the introduction of The Cornhill readers to Lily Dale, John Eames, and Adolphus Crosbie, Trollope had contributed to the same magazine a loosely written, satirical sketch, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, which a hostile critic might be excused for describing as Thackeray-and-water. With a congenial subject, Trollope could always be depended on for abundant humour and irony. Both these qualities in Brown, Jones, and Robinson lack the spontaneity or ease without which the charm of Trollope’s writing disappears. So, in fact, thought Trollope himself; so too, however courteously he softened the expression of his opinion, did the polite and amiable Mr. George Smith. Yet even so, Brown, Jones, and Robinson is not at all poorer than Thackeray’s own mark as seen in many of his earlier pieces for Fraser, and in many of the Roundabout Papers which he hurried through for The Cornhill while the printers were waiting for copy. It was Trollope’s single unqualified failure. Never again was he betrayed by his Thackeray homage into the mistake of mimicry.

As a fact, too, no one knew better than did Trollope, not only his own limitations and deficiencies, but Thackeray’s as well. The plums of the Postmaster-General’s department should in every case fall to men already at work in the office. That feeling of esprit de corps had in 1846 made Trollope oppose Rowland Hill’s introductions from outside to St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Two years later, or twelve years before Trollope’s connection with him began, Thackeray himself had, equally to Trollope’s disgust, contemplated an act of intrusion like Rowland Hill’s in the Postal Service. In 1848 the assistant-secretaryship fell vacant. The then Postmaster-General, Lord Clanricarde, the staunchest friend possessed by the novelist among those in high place, let Thackeray know he would do his best to secure him the billet. Lord Clanricarde’s second in command plainly told his chief that the thing was impossible. The Minister at once gave way, and accepted the official nominee, of course not a little to Thackeray’s chagrin.

On this transaction Trollope’s remark was that, had Thackeray succeeded in his attempt, he would surely have ruined himself. No man, he added, could be fit for the management and performance of special work who had learned nothing of it before his thirty-seventh year, Thackeray’s then age. No man, he further insisted, could be more signally unfit for it than Thackeray. The achievement of his ambition in this matter would have summoned him to duties impossible of performance except after a long course of expert training. In some cases, Trollope admitted, an “untried, elderly tyro” might have put himself into harness and discharged after a fashion the first duty of maintaining discipline over a large body of men; but of all men in the world Thackeray was the most egregiously and fatally disqualified for anything of the sort. The whole subject was one on which Trollope felt some difficulty in expressing himself. On the one hand, his grateful admiration of Thackeray made him anxious not to do that great man any injustice in the matter. On the other hand, his loyalty to his brethren of the Civil Service made him resent his idol’s apparent belief that a man may be a Government secretary with a generous salary and have nothing to do. Nor, he adds, did Thackeray consider how inexpressibly wearisome he would have found the details of his work, or in effect how impossible to a man of his habits and intolerance of all ties would have been attendance in the city every day from eleven to five. The conclusion, therefore, however reluctantly reached, is that Thackeray so underrated the intellectual demands made by their employments on the servants of the State as to see no difficulty in combining the mechanical drudgery of a public office with the creative labour of novel-writing and his other literary work. Yes, not without a touch of bitterness Trollope sums it all up: he might have done it had he risen at five, and sat at his private desk for three hours before beginning the day’s grind at the G.P.O. On this subject Trollope could speak with the practical experience of one who had gone through the exhausting monotony of the official mill, and who had taxed almost to breaking point his exceptional strength by combining with it his unceasing commissions for publishers.

Thackeray’s official aspirations were the fond dreams of a literary man who would fain have recalled in the nineteenth century that Augustan age in which, under Queen Anne, Joseph Addison was a Secretary of State, and, under George I, Matthew Prior became British Ambassador in Paris. Again, since the State is still accustomed to reward with money, titles of honour, garters, or stars, Thackeray wanted to know why men of letters should not have their turn as well as politicians and soldiers. Even in our own evil times the great Anglo-Saxon State on the other side of the Atlantic delighted to honour the pen in this way. The United States had sent Washington Irving (1830) as Minister to London; more than twenty years later (1853), it had made Nathaniel Hawthorne its consul at Liverpool. Fired by these precedents, six years after the miscarriage of his Post Office design, Thackeray (November 1854) had applied for the vacant secretaryship of our Washington Legation, with the result that Lord Clarendon, who then controlled the Foreign Office, replied: first, that the place was already filled; secondly, that it would be unfair to appoint out of the service; thirdly, that being a great novelist would not necessarily ensure a man’s being a good Minister.

When, therefore, Thackeray visited the United States, he did so in his own coat, as he himself put it, and not in the Queen’s. Nor, is Trollope’s comment, is there anyone on whom the Queen’s coat would have sat so ill. However that may be, there are few modern cases which could be cited in support of a literary man’s claim to employment in the English service abroad. During the years following Thackeray’s unsuccessful suit the official prospect for English literature somewhat brightened. Grenville Murray had combined diplomacy and authorship before Thackeray applied for Washington. Trollope’s own friend, Charles Lever, was first introduced to the consular service in 1852. Burton’s experiences of the same department date from 1861. In 1868 James Hannay was not too generously rewarded with the Barcelona consulship for his newspaper services to the Conservative cause. Since then Mr. James Bryce’s success at our Washington Embassy has brought us further in the direction of the great novelist’s dream than would have looked possible in Thackeray’s day.

These are not the only manifestations of the candour that blended itself with the warmth of Trollope’s appreciative friendship for Thackeray. His literary master’s defeat by Cardwell in the Oxford election in 1857 suggests a remark on “his foredoomed failure in the House of Commons, had he ever entered it, a failure rendered inevitable by his intolerance of tedium, his impatience of slow work, and his want of definite or accurate political convictions.”[17] More even than this, when Trollope comes to think about it, he feels by no means sure of Thackeray as Cornhill editor having been the right man in the right place. Did not, he implies, Thackeray’s own often-cited article in his magazine about the editorial position, Thorns in the Cushion, justify that misgiving? The great man was too perfunctory, could not bring himself personally to deal with all the manuscripts which poured in; he was obliged, in fact, as all editors are, to entrust some of the supervisory work to his subordinates. Worse than that, however, Thackeray actually rejected one of Trollope’s proffered contributions in the shape of a short story, on the ground that it might bring a blush to the cheek of the young person. Nothing could be more curiously characteristic of the man who gives it than the opinion formed by the author of Framley Parsonage of the first editor of The Cornhill. Trollope was compounded in nearly equal parts of an enthusiastic impulsiveness that came to him by nature, and of a shrewdly judicial man-of-the-world temper, largely formed and strengthened by his experiences of life in general, and, in a greater degree, of his Post Office experiences in particular. His twofold estimate of Thackeray signally illustrates this balance of opposite tendencies.

John Forster, who, after the fashion already described, had given Trollope his first chance of appearing in print, was one among the latest survivors of those who knew Thackeray intimately. Told in the year of his death, 1876, of Thackeray in the Men of Letters series being allotted to Trollope, he remarked with surprise, “Why, Trollope only knew him as editor of The Cornhill.” These things were before my time. Neither to me nor, I think, to any of my day, did Trollope volunteer any remarks about the extent to which circumstances had carried his personal knowledge of Thackeray. That the literary acquaintance of the two men eventually ripened into something like social intimacy was the opinion of Thackeray’s own familiars, such as the already mentioned E. F. S. Pigott and Tom Taylor who, though six years the great man’s junior, had been with him at Cambridge, and whose friendship with him to the day of his death was as unbroken as it was close. The same view on this point was taken also by G. A. Sala, who personally disliked Trollope, and had formerly resented his approaches to Thackeray, as well as by the accomplished and socially omniscient Sir W. A. Fraser, who, from his own independent experience, circumstantially confirmed to me the accuracy shown by Trollope in his rendering of all Thackerayan details. Both these henchmen of the great novelist were book and, incidentally, autograph collectors. Shortly before his death, Fraser and Trollope, each on a separate occasion going to dine with Thackeray at Palace Gate, brought with him a specially bound set of Thackeray’s works that the author might write his name therein. To both men Thackeray excused himself from doing so at the time, promised that he would see to the matter next day, and return the volumes. Meanwhile, the fatal Christmas had come and gone; the great man was no more. The books were punctually sent back to their owners. In neither set had Thackeray’s name been written.

Trollope’s Cornhill experiences, under Thackeray first and, in the case of The Claverings, under his successor, marked by far the most important and profitable connection with periodical literature. As a journalist, however, he had begun on the weekly press in 1848, while he was doing Post Office duty in Ireland. In 1859 or 1860 Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire excited in him a wish to combat the views expressed in that work about the Cæsars. The result was two articles on the subject, one dealing with Julius, the other with Augustus, in the Dublin University Magazine. By that time Charles Lever’s editorship of this periodical had ceased; but his good word helped Trollope with his successor. The articles then written, and just noticed, formed the germ of a future book hereafter to be mentioned. But, at the date of these Dublin University opportunities, Trollope was so entirely overcome with indignant disgust at the prospect of the Civil Service being thrown open to competitive examination, that he could write or think about little else. The Dublin University Magazine allowed him to relieve his overwrought feelings by discharging several pages of furious invective at the proposed change and its authors.

Whatever at different periods Trollope might think and call himself, his natural prejudices were always those of aristocratic and reactionary Toryism. Upon whatever grade, and whatever the work, provided it was not of an essentially plebeian kind, the public offices of this country must be reserved for gentlemen. Examinations might in some degree test brains; they could not ensure breeding. Without the ideas, the antecedents, and the social training which must remain the privilege of birth, mere book knowledge, diligence, and aptitude for drudgery would not of themselves guarantee the State the higher qualities it had a right to expect in its servants. Here spoke the same spirit as that which had impelled Anthony Trollope’s kinsman, the great Conservative squire, Sir John Trollope, in 1846 to place loyalty to his Protectionist principles before loyalty to his leader, Sir Robert Peel. Asseverations of this kind were much in request as arguments with those bent on retaining State employment for the exclusive profit of the privileged classes. Nor beyond these rhetorical commonplaces, with their conventional appeals to a pseudo-aristocratic feeling, did Anthony Trollope’s case against competitive examinations go. He lived long enough, if not cordially to acquiesce in the new system, yet, becoming Sir Charles Trevelyan’s personal friend, to agree with him that competition did not in its working involve more evils than patronage.

While on one of his visits to the Irish capital, about his contributions to the academic periodical, he first made, through the social offices of Charles Lever, one of the friendships that he renewed with special appreciation in his later life. J. S. Le Fanu had succeeded Lever as the editor of the Dublin University Magazine; to Le Fanu’s house in Merrion Square Trollope, accordingly, was taken by Lever. Here in the course of the evening a young lady—his host’s niece—asked whether she should read something to them she had written. The budding authoress became celebrated a little later as Miss Rhoda Broughton, and the manuscript in hand was that of a story that established her as a novelist in 1867, Not Wisely, but Too Well. Recalling this incident many years afterwards, Lever said: “Never before or since did I see Anthony Trollope so agreeable or so witty as on the evening he listened to the extracts Miss Broughton recited from her earliest book. In fact, the only mot with which I can ever credit him was flashed out on that occasion. The talk, I think, had been brought by W. H. Russell, who was of the party, to some one specially disliked by Trollope. ‘But,’ said Trollope, dismissing the subject, ‘let us hope better things of him in the future, as the old lady said when she heard that F. D. Maurice had preached the eventual salvation of all mankind.’”

Trollope took his place in the social and literary life of London under conditions and at an age that ensured his enjoying these new experiences with a greater zest than had they come earlier, and because they were the deferred, and occasionally the despaired of reward for toil, endurance, exile, equal to the picturing of his fondest dream. At the age of forty-five, with powers of enjoyment, as of work, yet unimpaired, he had in advance guaranteed himself against inconvenience from any possible check in his literary course by the eastern district surveyorship. This raised him above the dependence of a publisher’s hack, and enabled him to make better terms for his books. Its social as well as official experiences might, as he shrewdly foresaw, be trusted to ensure his imagination such a constant supply of fresh material as would preserve freshness and guard him against the sin of self-repetition. Thus, in little more than ten years after his earliest and unsuccessful novel, The Macdermots, and in five years after his first success with The Warden, he had won a position which rendered it tolerably certain that no new literary enterprise would be floated by men like George Smith, without the invitation of his services and goodwill. In another work[18] I have stated so fully the origin of The Pall Mall Gazette that any references to it here must be confined to the few points of contact between that newspaper and Trollope, whom it did not concern, in his impressions of this journalistic incident, circumstantially to bring out the fact that, beyond its name, The Pall Mall Gazette of real life owed nothing to Thackeray, and, as regards all its details, was the exclusive device of its first owner and its first editor. The announcement of the historical paper, prepared by Frederick Greenwood, who alone planned and who long conducted it, said nothing about a journal written “by gentlemen for gentlemen,” but only that a few men of letters had decided upon starting on a new venture which they thought would be found different from anything then before the public. Contributions of course were invited from Trollope upon any social events or humours of the hour that interested him. By this time he was as well known in certain parts of England as he had begun to be nearly a quarter of a century earlier, on the other side of St. George’s Channel, for an enthusiastic and intrepid rider to hounds.

At Waltham House, where his Post Office duties had made it convenient to settle, he was within practicable distance of several different meets. At Harlow, some ten miles from Waltham, were the kennels of the Essex pack, and with these he soon became a familiar figure. His earliest hunting friend, Charles Buxton, between 1865 and 1871 Member for East Surrey, on Trollope’s re-establishment in the home counties, was himself still a keen rider to hounds; Buxton’s friendship and introduction proved of special service to Trollope in connection with his favourite pastime. During Trollope’s experience of the Essex country, the district opened to him by his friends of the Buxton family was that known as the Roothings, chiefly hunted by the staghounds, but occasionally also the scene of a fox hunt. Famous for its stiff riding, it abounded in formidable fences and in deep ditches. In the sixties Trollope was a very heavy weight, and therefore frequently in difficulties; of these he made light, pulling himself together with surprising speed after a series of spills, and seldom failing to hold a good place at the end of a run. Of his fellow-Nimrods in the East Anglian region, there are still left Sir Evelyn Wood and Mr. E. N. Buxton, from personal experience to testify to the undaunted alacrity with which, after having been lost to view in the field, Trollope scaled the sides of a Roothing dyke, reappeared in the saddle, and pushed on with unabated vigour.

In addition to his weight, fatal, of course, to anything like equestrian elegance, Trollope had to contend against a defect of vision which no artificial relief entirely obviated. Hence some of the difficulties that used to beset him with the Essex pack and with H. Petre’s staghounds. His popularity in the field generally brought him timely relief in answer to his call for help. Such proved the case when, on one occasion, he had been making up lost ground after a fall in the middle of a ploughed field. The fellow-sportsman who then answered to his cry was no less a person than the present Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. “For heaven’s sake,” exclaimed Trollope, “be careful; I am afraid to move lest I should trample on my spectacles which have just fallen off my nose.” Quick as thought, the future Field-Marshal alighted from his horse, and retrieved the glasses. Having fitted them to his nose, Trollope rejoined the hunt with as much serene sturdiness as if the little contretemps had never occurred. Trollope’s sporting performances in the eastern home counties had also a social side he found highly useful for the purposes of his novels. Many of the sportsmen lived at London or elsewhere, renting at local inns a certain amount of stabling for their horses, together with suites of rooms for themselves during the season. They thus formed a club whose members, as often as convenient, dined together, and of which Trollope soon became free. It was a pleasant, cheery life that exactly suited the eminently clubbable Trollope. Glimpses of it are given in those passages of Phineas Finn describing the performances of that novel’s hero on Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker.

As Trollope wrote, so did he ride, confident that the animal he bestrode, equally the novelist’s Pegasus as his Irish mare, would in each case carry him successfully from point to point. Whether with the pen or on horseback, he took his own line. Neither checks nor even falls prevented his finishing at the spot and the hour he had from the first fixed. As much as he could desire of the sport he loved, in a good country, and with social accessories just suited to him; a constitution, naturally of iron, as yet practically untouched by years, and revealing no unsound spot; a sense of official importance gratified by the authority delegated to him from St. Martin’s-le-Grand; the inheritance at the London club he most frequented, the Garrick, of something like Thackeray’s own position; ascendency firmly established and wide popularity permanently won in the calling of novelist; freedom from all present anxiety as to his circumstances, and every year bringing a solid addition to his funded savings—all this surely formed a combination, such as might have made him who commanded it the happiest, as he was certainly the most fortunate, of men. And yet Trollope’s life was chronically saddened by recurrent moods of indefinable dejection and gloom. A sardonic melancholy he had himself imputed to Thackeray. In his own case the sardonic element was wanting, but the melancholy was habitually there, darkening his outlook alike upon the present and the future. “It is, I suppose,” he said, addressing the friend to whom, more than to any other, he unbosomed himself, Sir J. E. Millais, “some weakness of temperament that makes me, without intelligible cause, such a pessimist at heart.”

These seizures of despondency generally overtook him as he was riding home from a day with the hounds. They began with the reflection that he rode heavier in each successive season, and that in the course of nature the hunting, repeatedly prolonged beyond what he had fixed as its term, would have to be given up. The vague presentiment of impending calamity, as he himself put it, came, no doubt, from nothing more than an increasingly practical discovery of the Horatian truth:

Against the depressing influences thus engendered, Trollope lacked the natural resources of his two most famous contemporaries. Thackeray, if he had not always at his command spirits as high as Dickens, by an effort of purely intellectual strength could generally secure the enjoyment of life against the intrusion of unwelcome fancies and gloomy thoughts. Anthony Trollope was without Dickens’ perennially boyish zest of existence or Thackeray’s stubborn opposition to the first approach of the “blue devils.” His manner, habitually abrupt and sometimes imperious, concealed an almost feminine sensibility to the opinions of others, a self-consciousness altogether abnormal in a seasoned and practical man of the world, as well as a strong love of approbation, whether from stranger or friend. The inevitable disappointment of these instincts and desires at once pained and ruffled him beyond his power to conceal, and so produced what his physician and friend, Sir Richard Quain, once happily called “Trollope’s genial air of grievance against the world in general, and those who personally valued him in particular.”

The founding of The Pall Mall Gazette and other literary events belonging to the year 1865 were landmarks in Trollope’s progress for social rather than literary reasons. Some very slight sketches, exclusively or for the most part on hunting, were contributed by him to the evening paper which Frederick Greenwood’s experience and inventiveness had been helped by George Smith’s capital to create.[20] In those days more dining than is the habit to-day was considered essential to journalistic enterprise. George Smith’s earliest Pall Mall dinners soon became famous, and found Anthony Trollope a frequent guest. At these hospitalities he greatly extended the literary and political acquaintanceship which he had begun to make at the Garrick and at the Cosmopolitan, as well as added to it specimens of intellectual power, culture, and cosmopolitan knowledge hitherto seldom collected beneath the same London roof. Such were the three survivors among the chief original writers for The Saturday Review: H. S. Maine, his former Cambridge pupil and subsequently Saturday colleague, William Vernon Harcourt, and G. S. Venables, about whom it was then, as it still remains, uncertain whether he did or did not sit to Thackeray for the Warrington of Pendennis.

The second Lord Lytton, then attached to our Lisbon embassy, Julian Fane, and the eighth Viscount Strangford represented various branches of belles lettres, as well as of diplomacy and cosmopolitanism, in the company among which Trollope now found himself. Not the elder alone, but both the two brothers who were successively the seventh and eighth Lords Strangford are reflected, even to their personal appearance, in the Waldershare of Disraeli’s Endymion—fair with short, curly, brown hair and blue eyes, not exactly handsome, but with a countenance full of expression, and the index of quick emotions, whether of joy or sorrow. George Smythe, the seventh of the Strangford Viscounts, the reputed original of Coningsby, was no longer alive at the time of these Pall Mall dinners. His brother and successor, Percy, figured among Greenwood’s most important contributors from the first. None of the group now mentioned had the same vivid interest for Trollope as Strangford; but the most distinguished of the others, notably Fitzjames Stephen, William Rathbone Greg, George Henry Lewes, and James Hannay, exercised upon him something of the same educational influence that they did upon Greenwood himself. Many years subsequently to this, Trollope met as a guest at the Cosmopolitan Club the ex-officer of the French Navy, L. M. J. Viaud, who, as Pierre Loti, became famous in 1880. “I could not,” was Trollope’s comment, “amid the many personal dissimilarities of the two, but be struck by a certain resemblance between James Hannay’s breezy picturesqueness in stating his views of history or politics, and the touches, as graphic as they were delicate, that made Viaud’s descriptions, whether in conversation or writing, living things.”

The period now reached was to present Trollope with another new connection in periodical literature, not less noticeable in itself, and more far-reaching in some of its consequences than any of those already mentioned. His first dealings with the publishers Chapman and Hall, while still settled at 193 Piccadilly, were, as has been already said, over Dr. Thorne in 1858. Pre-eminent among the nineteenth century writers as the novelist of English home-life, Trollope possessed, and on occasion showed, as much of international sympathy as Bulwer-Lytton himself, and, by original observation as well as by English and foreign reading, took real pains to keep himself in touch with the higher European thought of his time. Occasionally he took his summer holiday at a pretty little hamlet in the Black Forest, Höllenthal, near Freiburg. Here he sometimes received visits from well-placed continental friends who, in a few hours’ talk, took him effectively behind the scenes of European society letters, politics, or finance. From Höllenthal, too, were made those excursions that not only acquainted him with the most-desired hospitalities of Cologne, Frankfort, and Berlin, but that also brought him into the heart of the Fatherland’s inner life as seen, now in obscure towns or obscurer villages, now in the studies and lecture-rooms of thinkers and writers. Such were the experiences that suggested to Trollope’s active mind the possibility of founding a magazine which should be for England what the Revue des deux Mondes was for France; that periodical, as was happily said by Lord Morley of Blackburn, had “brought down abstract discussion from the library to the man in the street.” Why should not, Trollope asked himself, the like of this be done here. The same idea had occurred almost simultaneously to others of light and learning in contemporary literature. Huxley, E. A. Freeman, Sir R. F. Burton, E. S. Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison, and the present poet laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, promised the enterprise their “vote and interest”; Lord Houghton, without whose counsel and goodwill no undertaking of the sort could then have been carried out, forwarded it not only with his blessing but his purse.

Among others less well known but not less active co-operating to the same end were Danby Seymour, Charles Waring, a shrewd, genial Yorkshireman of intellectual tastes and parliamentary ambitions, whose interest in the project had been secured by one already mentioned more than once in these pages, E. F. S. Pigott. Waring, who subsequently married a daughter of Sir George Denys of Draycote, Yorkshire, and was from 1865 to 1868 M.P. for Poole, became the father of Captain Walter Waring, returned in 1907 for Banffshire. In the sixties, however, he was a man about town, living in The Albany, as generous and eclectic in his bachelor hospitalities as, after his marriage, in the cosmopolitan banquets which during the eighties gave his house, 3 Grosvenor Square, a place of its own in the chronicle of the London season. During that subsequent period Waring once thought of buying back from its possessors, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the periodical to founding which he had contributed. Then, however, Trollope, at whose instance Pigott’s influence had originally prevailed on Charles Waring to co-operate in bringing The Fortnightly Review to the birth, was dead against the parting of the property to any new purchaser.

At the date now looked back upon, Waring’s Albany Chambers were frequented by other clever and notable men, all of them, in their different ways, highly useful at its beginnings to the literary enterprise. Such were Ralph Earle, who, as Benjamin Disraeli’s private secretary during part of 1859, sat for Berwick-on-Tweed. Soon after this Earle gave up politics, as he had before given up diplomacy. He had the Italian or Spanish genius for statecraft, but no special qualifications for a deliberative assembly. The knowledge of international policy and finance, picked up in the course of his European wanderings, he employed congenially and successfully in negotiating concessions from foreign sovereigns and statesmen for great capitalists engaged in railways and other public works, especially Baron de Hirsch. Earle’s House of Commons contemporary, Danby Seymour, Waring’s predecessor in the representation of Poole, was without the rare intellectual power and subtlety that marked Disraeli’s former secretary. He was, however, a typical specimen of the intellectual and political man about town, with an altogether extraordinary knowledge of high-class periodicals in every European country and language. Be sure, was his advice, to cultivate as an entirely new feature, the best account that can be written for each number of all contemporary movements, foreign as well as domestic, with their tendency and value, whether in the region of politics, letters, science, or economics. Seymour’s suggested article at once became a feature, and received from Trollope himself the title, “Home and Foreign Affairs.” The little conferences in the Piccadilly precinct that preceded the appearance of The Fortnightly proved a valuable experience to Trollope. They took him for the first time in his life behind the political scenes, and brought him into close quarters with men from whom he afterwards drew the political figures that flit through his later novels.

Danby Seymour had held subordinate office in Lord Palmerston’s second administration. His brother Alfred, often with him on these occasions, had been member for Shaftesbury. They both had fine estates in Wiltshire—subsequently disposed of to Mr. Percy Wyndham—as well as Mayfair houses, one in Curzon Street, the other near it, and each possessed a fine collection of pictures. In a word, the Seymour kinsmen, to whom The Fortnightly Review operations alone introduced Trollope, were thoroughly characteristic of the class and period that he introduced in Can You Forgive Her? (1864), and which afterwards he was to describe more minutely in the political novels that began with Phineas Finn.

Trollope showed his knowledge of recent and remote history by reminding his company that leading out of the same corridor as Waring’s rooms were those in which Douglas Cook, creator and first editor of The Saturday Review, saw, of a Tuesday morning, his contributors, and later in the day dined his great friends or wealthy patrons of the Hope and Pelham name. A generation earlier Trollope discovered, in the same Piccadilly precinct, Lord Althorp had rallied his followers for the attack upon the Conservatives under the Duke of Wellington that was to establish the reform ministry of Grey. Such formed the associations of the four walls within which were completed the arrangements that resulted in the appearance, on the 15th of May, 1865, of the first number of The Fortnightly Review, with the cry, “No party but a free platform.” At the same time, the choice of George Henry Lewes as first editor, on the then Mr. John Morley’s recommendation, seemed to promise that the champions of progress were not likely to have the worst of it in any discussions which might enliven the pages of The Fortnightly. The title explains itself; the Review was to appear on the first and fifteenth of each month, at a price of two shillings. In 1866 Mr. Morley succeeded Lewes as editor. The October issue of that year announced the suspension for the present of the mid-monthly number. Thus, among the three Fortnightly editors during Trollope’s time, the earliest, George Lewes, was the only one who conducted a magazine literally true to its title. With the number of January, 1867, the present series began; at the same time the price was raised from a florin to half a crown.

Trollope always felt a paternal interest, and sometimes exercised a paternal power, in the periodical that thus at its different stages associated itself with so many well-known names, and that, without any loss of position, had in infancy dropped any etymological claim to the name given it by Trollope himself. When The Fortnightly funds, raised in the manner already described, had been spent, the copyright passed to the publishers. Of these, Frederick Chapman, by his energy and zeal for the enterprise, had already made himself a part of the Review, uniformly co-operating, then and afterwards, in all matters that pertained to it, with Trollope. Thus far, Trollope sympathised with, or did not reprobate, the advanced opinions advocated by its chief writers. He remained, indeed, for many years afterwards, enough of a Liberal to remonstrate with Mr. Alfred Austin on securing for his elder brother, Tom, the Italian correspondence of The Standard, at the price, he feared, of his conversion to Conservatism. For though, as has already been seen, Trollope’s inborn prejudices, social training, and personal antipathies were all strongly Conservative, the accidents of later experience, operating on his actively controversial temper; made him pass for a Liberal during those Palmerstonian and early Gladstonian eras when Liberalism took its principles from the reactionary moderates rather than the progressives. He wished to see in power men whose administrative abilities would secure prosperity and a fair distribution of material comforts, as well as civil or political rights at home, and the exercise of English influence to redress international grievances, and to put down oppression abroad. But this was coupled always with the condition of the country being ruled and represented by the privileged classes, to whom no one was more proud of belonging than himself. So long as they were in the hands of gentlemen, he really cared little about the political label borne by those responsible for the conduct of affairs. The demagogue and leveller, whether on the platform or in print, were always the same abominations to his earlier manhood that the professional agitator and the foreign fomenters of Irish disaffection became to his later years.

His favourite intellectual progeny, as he regarded The Fortnightly Review, might be trusted, he thought, to reflect his own ideas, and to avoid the falsehood of extremes, at least as much in one direction as in the others. He therefore felt something of a Lear’s paternal pain and indignation when the editor and his self-willed contributors seemed bent on converting the periodical from a platform for the discussion of all questions by the light of pure reason, on lines agreeable to impartial intellect alone, into a pulpit, as it struck Trollope, for maintaining the most audacious and subversive neologies, social or political, civil or religious. His misgivings were exchanged for certainty during the course of 1867. In that year the war between labour and capital reached its height. The public had not recovered from the horror and disgust it had received from the trades union excesses which Broadhead had instigated at Sheffield, when Mr. Frederick Harrison came out with his famous defence of strikes and unions in The Fortnightly Review. Nor was it the industrial question only on which The Fortnightly articles excited Trollope’s apprehension. To the end of the sixties and to the first year of the next decade belonged the acutest phase of the perennial dispute whether national elementary teaching should rest on a purely secular, on a chiefly religious basis, or should be supported on the result of a compromise between the two. That last was the ministerial view which, in his pending Elementary Schools Bill, W. E. Forster, as vice-President of the Council, and practically Education Minister, aimed at establishing. He thus, of course, satisfied neither side. The religious educationalists of the National Union, with Manchester for its headquarters, charged the author of the 1870 Bill with indifference whether the rising generation was brought up in the Christianity of its forefathers, or victimised to the heathenish fads and godless crotchets of the secularist and agnostic education-mongers, looked upon with the same horror by Trollope as all other radicals or revolutionaries. On the other hand, the Birmingham League, with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain for its political champion, and the unimpeachably Christian Congregational minister, R. W. Dale, for its prophet and guide, held that, in the long run, both learning and religion would fare best if in State schools religion formed no part of the official curriculum. So, too, thought, or as Trollope fancied, seemed to think, the leading spirits of The Fortnightly Review. Against these Anthony Trollope was up in arms. The articles advocating the League’s policy suggested a deliberate plot to suppress the Holy Scriptures in the National schools.

His disapproval of the political school whose ascendency The Fortnightly confessed did not prevent him from being one of its contributors. In addition to the novel he ran through it, The Belton Estate, presently to be dwelt on, he made the Review an arena for a struggle with E. A. Freeman about the morality of field sports in general, and of his own greatly enjoyed hunting in particular. This controversy, marked on both sides by prejudice rather than argument, and by vigour instead of subtlety, was, as might have been expected, no better than a waste of time, temper, and space. Had it been possible to bring forward any new pros or cons, neither Freeman nor Trollope was the man to do it. Ouida and her friend, Sir Frederick Johnstone, talking over the matter at one of her Langham Hotel causeries intimes, “where cigarettes and even cigars were permitted,” said: “I think if these two pundits had handed the matter over to us, we could have put a little more life into it, and perhaps sent up by a few copies the periodical which is the pasture-ground of professors and prigs.” Trollope was as far from being a prig as from being a philosopher. But he had equally few qualifications for a controversialist likely to freshen up an ancient theme, and in this disability he was well matched with Freeman.

Meanwhile, he had invested capital in the house of Chapman and Hall; after the publishing business had been turned into a limited company he remained one of the shareholders, and transmitted his interest in it to those in whose favour he drew his will. He was, from its foundation to the end of his life, a director of the company, but besides this, his intimacy with the manager of its publishing business, Frederick Chapman, as well as with that gentleman’s well-to-do relatives with a large share in the concern, gave, and kept for Trollope to the day of his death, the position of an amicus curiæ, whose literary advice was asked and taken on important matters. But the sensational stage of the development of The Fortnightly was not fully reached during his life. He survived, however, to witness the first signs of its advent in an article which, under the signature “Judex,” appeared in the spring of 1880, after Beaconsfield’s final overthrow, and the formation of Gladstone’s second Cabinet. “It was,” said the writer of the article now recalled, “an extraordinary victory won by the nation against an extraordinary man, in some of his powers never surpassed, whose life was the most astonishing of all careers in the annals of parliament, and who, though decisively vanquished, would not, it was to be hoped, retire, because a Liberal Government, more than any other, imperatively needs a strong Opposition for the due and sane performance of its work.” This composition was at once discovered to have the importance of a State paper. The editor, Mr. John Morley, had not then entered parliament as member for Newcastle-on-Tyne. Previously, however, to that he had fought not only Blackburn but Westminster under the Gladstonian flag. He was known to stand high in the Liberal leader’s confidence. It was generally asserted, without contradiction then or since, that the pseudonym at the end of the piece veiled the identity of no less a person than W. E. Gladstone himself. Trollope, at the most, did not think much of it, and drily remarked that fictitious pen names violated one of the principles of the Review. He had consistently protested, and indeed actively struggled against, the conversion of an impartial and philosophical magazine into the mouthpiece of men to whose opinions he could not reconcile himself, though their expression was judiciously revised by an editor not only as able, but as fair-minded as any periodical was fortunate enough to possess. Having retired from practical opposition, and accepted what he thought was the inevitable, he remarked: “The whirligig of time brings its own revenges, and wisdom is justified of her children. I shall not live to see it, but a generation or so hence The Fortnightly, recovering from these its earlier excesses, will revert to its original mission, and give the world the best which can be written for or against any school of politics and philosophy in Church or State.” This characteristic prediction has at least, in the twentieth century, fulfilled itself to the letter. Under its present accomplished editor, as under his latest predecessors, irrespectively of party position or personal proclivities, the periodical has been opened to all competent writers with a message to deliver.

CHAPTER X

THE BROADENING OF THE LITERARY AND GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON

THACKERAY’s death in 1863 had left Trollope without any special intimate among his fellow-craftsmen. Several years later, indeed, his success as a novelist brought him, after the manner to be duly mentioned in its proper place, into business relations with Dickens, his mother’s rather than his own old friend. John Forster, it has been seen, may be said first to have brought him out in print. With that ex-editor of The Examiner, Trollope always maintained some social intimacy, visiting him first in the Lincoln’s Inn Chambers, where he so long lived, and afterwards more frequently at his house in Queen’s Gate. Here the chief new literary acquaintance formed by Trollope was with the second Lord Lytton, who snatched from his diplomatic employments abroad enough time for constant reappearance in literary circles at home. Between 1865 and 1875, however, the most interesting and eventful visits paid by Trollope to any host among contemporary writers were those to Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Lewes at The Priory, North Bank, Regent’s Park. At these well-known Sunday afternoon receptions, Trollope first found himself at the social heart of the highest nineteenth century culture. G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope were all nearly of an age. How far Lewes and his scientific tastes affected George Eliot’s literary style may be an open question. There is no doubt that George Eliot in her turn influenced Trollope’s views of life and character. In Trollope’s time, the regular Sunday habitués of the double drawing-room at The Priory, for the most part men, seldom failed to number among them Frederick Leighton, whose drawings for Romola decorated the walls; E. S. Beesly, History Professor at London University College; Robert Browning always; sometimes, on his rare visits to London, Alfred Tennyson; the philosophers Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, E. F. S. Pigott invariably; occasionally Owen Jones, to whose decorative art The Priory owed scarcely less than the Crystal Palace itself; some men of note from the Universities; and generally one or two foreigners of distinction in letters, science, or art.

Of all this company, none more frequently than Trollope obtained a seat near Mrs. Lewes’ armchair on the left of the fire-place. The two novelists never talked publicly about themselves, but among the guests there were some who noticed a kind of parallel in George Eliot’s and Anthony Trollope’s literary courses. The earliest successes of both with the general public won the favour also of their most famous fellow-authors. Thackeray pleasantly complained if, after the day’s work was done, he could not at once refresh himself with The Three Clerks. George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life had no sooner appeared in Blackwood’s than Dickens conjured all those about him to read them, saying, “They are the best things I have seen since I began my course.” A little later, Miss Marian Evans, to recall for a moment the name which never, by the by, appeared on the title-page of any of her books, set the literary world speculating about the identity veiled by the George Eliot pseudonym. Dickens alone penetrated the mystery, after reading the description of Hetty Sorrel doing her back hair. Only a woman, and one of first-rate genius, could have written that, he said. Hence his oracular reply, through his daughter, to a letter asking his opinion on the subject: “Papa wishes me to say he feels sure Adam Bede is either by Bradbury or Evans, and he doesn’t think it’s Bradbury.”[21]

George Eliot, like many other great writers, avoided, so far as possible, reading the periodical reviews of her books. Love of approbation was with her a phrenological organ strongly developed; as all writers cannot but do, she found sweetness in the appreciation of her work by other labourers in the same literary field as her own. During the later fifties she made more than one visit to Florence and its neighbourhood in quest of materials and local colour for Romola, published in 1863. On those occasions she saw much of Anthony Trollope’s elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, who had made the Tuscan capital his home, and who never left it save on a short and rare visit to England. Anthony Trollope’s familiarity with the place dated, as has been seen, from the visit paid by him to his mother during her residence there. Those early reminiscences naturally increased Anthony Trollope’s interest in Romola. “A delightful generous letter from Mr. Anthony Trollope about Romola” brightened and encouraged the authoress in one of those moods of passing depression that sometimes beset the most intellectual toilers. “The heartiest, most genuine, moral and generous of men.” Such, at an earlier state of their acquaintance, had been the impression given by the author of The Small House at Allington to the hostess of The Priory at those Sunday afternoon receptions. In common with his fellow-guests Trollope felt to the full the austere charm of George Eliot’s grave urbanity, and of her conversation—brightened indeed by no flashes of humour, but occasionally seasoned with utterances of penetrating sagacity condensed into epigram. With this woman of genius Trollope became a personal favourite. More than that, the two novelists appreciably, to some extent, influenced each other. “I am not at all sure,” George Eliot told Mrs. Lynn Linton, “that, but for Anthony Trollope, I should ever have planned my studies on so extensive a scale for Middlemarch, or that I should, through all its episodes, have persevered with it to the close.”

Trollope’s progress as a novelist owed something to his acquaintance with the two chief literary women of his age. Mention has already been made of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s preference over all his earlier stories for The Three Clerks. Nothing else of his, she said, had thus far combined so happily pure romance with realistic incident. This praise, he told the present writer, had the effect of doubling his care with the labour of plot-weaving in connection with character-drawing. This was in 1858. In 1862 Orley Farm produced nearly the same compliment to him from the author of Adam Bede. Ten years after Mrs. Browning’s hints came the inspiring and instructive intercourse with George Eliot. Fresh from that association Trollope began to deal less superficially than his earlier stories had required with feminine problems. Into his comedy narrative of manners were now introduced questions of social casuistry, involving moral issues of a graver kind than those which so far had charged his atmosphere. Among the most marked of Trollope’s mental features was his receptivity. This had been already shown by the literary account to which he successively turned his Post Office experiences at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, in Ireland, and again after that in England, provincial as well as metropolitan. His admiration of George Eliot’s art generally, particularly of those qualities in her work that secured her the compliment of comparison with Shakespeare, did without affecting his literary style and method to some degree influence, as he himself felt, his views of character and life.

Can You Forgive Her? (1864), as will presently be shown, marked a fresh stage in the novelist’s evolution. In the manifestation of poetic gifts the natural order of advance has always been from the idyllic to the epic. Whether with the founder of pastoral poetry this may have been the case we do not know, since from Theocritus there have come down to us from him no strains more militant than those in which he celebrated the rivalries, the loves, the alternate fears and hopes, not of a purely ideal Arcadia, but as those sentiments existed in everyday life among the Syracusan swains and shepherds whom in real life he knew. The Virgilian Bucolics were in wide circulation before, at the wish of Augustus, the Æneid was begun. So with English poets. Milton’s shorter and gentler compositions preceded Paradise Lost by the best part of a generation. Alexander Pope’s Pastorals soothed pleasantly the popular ear while their author still meditated in his Twickenham grotto the English presentation of the Greek and Latin heroic masterpieces. So too with Trollope. The broader canvas, the greater variety of personages, and the swifter sequence of stirring incident exemplified a progress corresponding with that just explained.

Something of the same sort had already happened, or was about to take place with a literary ornament of the Victorian age, of an order more illustrious than Anthony Trollope. The greatest, probably, of modern English poets who have ever filled the office of laureate made his first successful appeal to the public with compositions that were in metre much what Trollope’s Cornhill stories were in prose. Six years older than Anthony Trollope, Alfred Tennyson had first caught the English ear with his rural lays and lyrics of English home life. The taste thus gratified, as well as to some extent created, demanded prose fiction possessing domestic interest of the same kind. The public had delighted in The Miller’s Daughter, The Sisters, The Gardener’s Daughter, Dora, Audley Court, and Edwin Morris from the poet. It, therefore, found what exactly suited its mood in Framley Parsonage, and The Small House at Allington from the novelist. The way for Trollope’s popularity had also been prepared, not only by writers of his own period, but by the gradual evolution of the English novels at the hand of its earlier masters. His stories of everyday life began to appear while Jane Austen’s novels were still in the highest favour and Maria Edgeworth’s still retained much of their original vogue. Charlotte Yonge had first extended her fame from the High Church circles to the general public a little later, and retained her position well into the nineteenth century’s second half. But the well-to-do and more or less cultivated English households that read and discussed The Heir of Redclyffe had by no means ceased to care for the analysis of feminine character as illustrated by English fiction’s earliest master of that art, Samuel Richardson. There were, too, Richardson’s less famous or now almost forgotten successors; these numbered not only Thomas Holcroft, but Robert Page, whose Hermsprang contains studies of girlhood and womanhood as effective, and, in their day as much admired, as any of the portraits in “those large, still books,” to apply to them Tennyson’s description. The welcome given to those heroines on their first appearance before the public presaged in its warmth and universality the reception awaiting the latter-day descendants of the men, the matrons, and widows whom Richardson’s example had encouraged Trollope to think no labour of observation or of pen too great, if, as he had seen them, he could in his stories, to the life, reproduce, not only them, but their social atmosphere and surroundings. This Trollope did, and an older generation, which knew Richardson first-hand, encouraged its juniors to see in Lily Dale and Lucy Robarts most of what an earlier age had found in Clarissa Harlowe and Pamela.

Such were the earlier among the literary labourers in something like his own path of industry who undoubtedly, as no one saw more clearly than he did himself, acted as the pioneers of Trollope’s particular industry. In what relation did he stand to his own contemporaries? More than any other of these George Eliot disciplined and developed personages in themselves often commonplace, by means of abnormal experiences and exceptionally dramatic situations. Trollope, on the other hand, before the season of his personal intercourse with George Eliot during the early sixties and thereafter, found the familiar conjunctures of everyday life abundantly rich in all the opportunities he needed for the evolution of those characters—daughters, mothers, and sweethearts—to whom his readers had no sooner been introduced than they began to share Trollope’s own love for these, the novelist’s own creations. It was during 1862, the year of his first visit to America, that Trollope first acquainted his readers with feminine types whose display and development required another set of surroundings as well as incidents somewhat outside the common routine. The earliest of the fresh ventures belongs to 1862. The monthly parts in which Orley Farm then appeared, as several of Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels had already been issued, were not the only detail wherein Trollope conformed to the great examples of his time. During the early sixties the popularity of the sensational novel, introduced by Mrs. Henry Wood, was confirmed by Wilkie Collins and was still further increased and extended by Miss Braddon. No one, as will be more fully seen on a later page, mirrored more promptly and faithfully than Trollope the literary tendencies of this time. Always quick to take a hint, Trollope therefore introduced the sensational element into the novel Orley Farm, and, by its successful appeal to interests, which it had not yet fallen within his scope to touch, completely justified the new experiment.

The seeds of the plot for the story now to be considered had been long sown in Anthony Trollope’s mind. He himself partly attributed their promise of fruitfulness to conversations on the subject with his brother Thomas Adolphus. When their father removed his household gods from Bloomsbury to Harrow Weald he became, it may be remembered, successively the occupant of two houses. The first, a convenient and even handsome building, had been raised by himself under the name of Julians. The second roof that sheltered him and his family was a farmhouse he had found standing on the ground he rented. This formed the original of the structure in which Trollope laid the scene of a novel that had engaged him earlier than his Cornhill stories. Some of the most stirring incidents in Orley Farm grow out of events which took place several years before the opening of the narrative.

The Johnsons were a family that had done well in the hardware business. They had, indeed, almost attained the dignity of county standing. Suddenly they fell upon evil times. As a result, Mr. Johnson’s name appeared in The Gazette. He had, however, one valuable asset in the person of his handsome daughter Mary. This young lady’s calm and dignified beauty eventually attracted, among her father’s north-country acquaintances, old Sir Joseph Mason, a desolate widower of Groby Park, Yorkshire, whose ambition it had always been to become the founder of a territorial line. His three daughters had all married well; each of them, together with their husbands, shared their father’s social aspirations. Such were some of the ready-made relatives by whom Mary Johnson, on giving her hand in marriage to Sir Joseph Mason, was to find herself surrounded. Though Sir Joseph Mason’s chief estate and principal country house lay to the north of the Trent, his favourite residence had long been the modest building in one of the home counties known as Orley Farm situated between twenty and thirty miles from London. At the time of his settlement at Orley Farm, Sir Joseph Mason’s son and heir by his first marriage, Joseph Mason junior, had almost reached the age of forty, when, to his chagrin and his nearest kith and kin’s disgust, his father’s second marriage bore fruit in the birth of a brother, Lucius Mason. The undoubted inheritor of the chief Mason property, Groby Park, Joseph Mason had always counted on possessing, on his father’s death, Orley Farm as well. When, however, old Sir Joseph’s will came to be read, it disclosed a codicil bequeathing Orley Farm to his infant son, Lucius. Another testamentary disposition equally unexpected was that of £2000 to Miriam Usbech, the daughter of that attorney, Jonathan Usbech, employed by Sir Joseph Mason to draft the Will with the codicil, round which the interest of the story centres. The provisions of that document, contested by the eldest son, had formed the subject of an action which he brought against Lady Mason before the novel begins. That had been decided in Lady Mason’s favour. The curtain thus rises on the late Sir Joseph’s eldest son, baffled by his step-mother in the effort legally to assert his ownership of the entire Mason property, and, by this failure, more keenly even than his sisters embittered against her. His half-brother, Lucius, now between twenty and twenty-five, having finished his education in a German university, has brought home with him scientific ideas of farming, and of land improvement generally, which are greatly to increase the value of the Orley Farm, whose master, on attaining his majority, he became. Meanwhile his half-brother, settled at the Yorkshire headquarters of the family, Groby, has held no intercourse with him. Sir Joseph Mason’s two sons have indeed always been strangers to each other.

By this time also, Miriam Usbech, a beneficiary, as has been already mentioned, under Sir Joseph’s Will to the extent of £2000, has become the wife of a local solicitor, Dockwrath, whose practice lies near Orley Farm. This man had received from Lady Mason, during the minority of her son Lucius, a grant of land on the understanding that it should remain in his hands until it might be wanted by her son, as possessor of the farm. Lucius has no sooner arrived at his majority than the contingency thus forecast is realised. The ground in question has become, he finds, essential for the improvement he is bent on introducing into the estate. Dockwrath, therefore, has, in the earlier chapters of the book, conceived a grudge against Lucius Mason, as well as a strong suspicion of his mother. A search among the papers of his father-in-law, Jonathan Usbech, discloses the fact that the alleged witnesses to old Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of a codicil devising Orley Farm to Lucius must, on the same day, have witnessed also the execution of another legal instrument. That strikes Dockwrath as, to say the least of it, odd; he therefore hunts up these witnesses and puts to them the question: Did they, on the date of certifying Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of the codicil, certify also in a like capacity his signature of the other paper? So far from thinking she did anything of the sort, the interrogated witness felt quite certain that she had only seen Sir Joseph writing his name once.

The results of this inquiry are communicated by Dockwrath to the master of Groby Park, who forthwith commences a second suit against his step-mother on the charge of perjury committed at the first trial. At this point begins the real action of the novel under conditions so sombre, and in an atmosphere loaded so depressingly with a sense of coming evil, that considerations of art and nature imperatively demand some relief. This lighter element is supplied by expedients resembling those which, for a similar purpose, were adopted so skilfully in Trollope’s first book, The Macdermots. The humorous passages, now following in brisk and varied succession, without actually advancing the movement of the story are no mere excrescences upon it. They give life and reality to the figures in the central episode, and in their place are perfectly natural as being Dockwrath’s experiences on his momentous journey to Groby Park. Their drollery relaxes the nerve tension at a painful point, but deepens, by the force of contrast, the dark presentiment of the tragic catastrophe to which the freakish fun of the commercial-room visited by Dockwrath forms a comic prelude. Humorous criticism or witty dialogue, seasoned with incisive repartee, was not Trollope’s strongest point. He is, however, seen at his best in these laughter-moving descriptions of bagmen’s buffoonery or in the sketches of platitude-mongering vulgarity, which his fresh and vigorous seizure of slight personal distinctions redeems from commonplace.

Samuel Dockwrath was a little man with sandy hair, a pale face, and stone-blue eyes. Those who knew Anthony Trollope in the flesh saw in him one who, at his prime, had stood some six feet in his socks, with the other parts of his person on a corresponding scale. It was not, however, his goodly proportions of body that so much impressed the judicious observer as the penetrating fire of the quick blue eyes. This was intensified rather than concealed by the large, heavy spectacles which so entirely remedied any natural infirmity of vision that, after he had taken to wearing them, his eyes never missed a single characteristic feature of his fellow-creatures, or failed accurately and at once to stamp the impression they received on the retentive brain. Those were the eyes that had themselves seen on his Post Office doors—for the most part those in England—each one of Dockwrath’s companions in the commercial-room of the Bull Inn at Leeds. Dickens himself, unsurpassed in sketching the humours of the road as well as the outer and inner life of its travellers’ houses of call, paid Trollope a special compliment on the rapid successions of life-like touches with which he draws a contrast between the arrival at an inn of regular habitués and strangers—the former loud, jocular, assured, or, in case of deficient accommodation, loud, angry, and full of threats; the strangers shy, diffident, doubtful, anxious to propitiate the chambermaid by great courtesy. To the latter belonged Dockwrath. To the former belonged another arrival by the same train, called Moulder, whose salutation to the girl at the bar, “Well, Mary, my dear, what’s the time of day with you?” is met with the reply, “Time to look alive and keep moving.” This has been introduced by a living picture of Dockwrath’s effort to make himself as much at home as the freest and easiest frequenters of the place by calling for a pair of public slippers, while solacing himself with a glass of mahogany-coloured brandy and water and a cigar. Here end the comic preliminaries.

The tragic realities that have brought Dockwrath from London to Yorkshire are opened by the solicitor’s call on Joseph Mason at Groby Park. The £2000, it must be remembered, which old Sir Joseph had left to Dockwrath’s wife were devised to her in the codicil that it is the real object of Dockwrath’s interview with Lady Mason’s stepson to upset. Ostensibly, therefore, as Dockwrath reminds the squire of Groby, the solicitor’s own interest lies in maintaining, not invalidating the supplementary bequests. Duty, however, has first claim upon the man of law, who begins his conversation by hinting that Joseph Mason’s representatives, Round and Crook, have been slack in guarding their clients’ interest. Will not Mr. Dockwrath, Mr. Mason suggests, see Round and Crook themselves, and so save time and trouble by imparting to them his tale of misgivings and suspicions? No, Dockwrath will do nothing of the sort. His message is for Joseph Mason alone. Then comes the decisive conversation in which Dockwrath’s shrewdness tells him that his cue is only to begin with piquing Mason’s curiosity and emphasising by a significant reserve the imputations against his stepmother. At last, he sees reason to fear he may be irritating and offending rather than interesting the squire of Groby by his prolix exordium. He therefore concentrates all his damning suggestions into the one word, forgery. Even this only elicits from Joseph Mason the remark: “I always felt sure my father never intended to sign such a codicil as that.” The question about the line of action to be now taken is the more difficult because the children of Sir Joseph Mason’s first marriage have already disputed the will with the result that a Court of Justice has given its award in Lady Mason’s favour. Before deciding on further litigation, Joseph Mason must consult his men of business in London. Meanwhile, what is likely to be said by the undoubted witnesses to the will and the alleged witnesses to the codicil—did they or did they not upon the same day attest the signatures to separate documents?

When the conference arranged between Mason and Dockwrath takes place, Bridget Bolster, who is known to have been a witness to the Will, and alleged to have witnessed also a codicil, in an interview with Messrs. Round and Crook has most positively declared her certainty that she never attested more than one document on the same day. Still, Messrs. Round and Crook are against prosecuting Lady Mason. Joseph Mason’s emphatic rejoinder, “I will never drop the prosecution,” encourages for a moment Dockwrath’s hope of getting the business. On that point Mason is as obstinate as on the other. The case, therefore, goes forward under the London attorney’s management. Trollope justly prided himself on the accuracy with which, thanks to the experts he consulted, are presented the legal details in the trial and in all the business connected with it. The entire episode is, like the characters that figure in it, a piece of skilfully contrived realism. The Old Bailey barrister, Chaffanbrass, who rises to his work so meekly, smiling gently while he fidgets about with his papers as though he were not at first quite master of the situation; Sir Richard Leatherham, the Solicitor-General and the leading counsel for the prosecution, are none of them full-length sketches from life. Each is a composite of many originals. Nor is there a single member of the group who does not recall, by some trick of manner, of voice, or by some other distinctive peculiarity, the qualities of advocates well known in the era during which Cairns, Coleridge, and Ballantine were in the full flush of their forensic fame.

Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities, notoriously found his model for Darnay’s counsel, Stryver, in Edwin James. Of James I can recall Trollope’s remark: “I had scarcely ever seen him, out of court or in it, but I have been told he had Chaffanbrass’s habit of constantly arranging and re-arranging his wig, and of sometimes, for effect, dropping his voice so low that it could scarcely be heard.” The other court scenes form a little series of artistically disposed photographs. More skilful even than these clever descriptions is the manner in which a few simple and well-chosen words, remarkable for their power, less of expression than suggestion, bring Lady Mason’s anguish and agony home to the reader as vividly as could be done by any minute and harrowing details of her countenance and carriage. Even so, the suspense caused by these Acts in the drama called for mitigation by Trollope’s favourite device of entertaining interlude. The by-play of the under-plot now introduced shows throughout the true mastery of his art here reached by Trollope.

Lady Mason’s good looks, noble bearing, and painful position, have deeply interested her leading counsel, Furnival, her acquaintance in society long before he became her advocate in Court. Hence, the one deviation from exact verisimilitude in this part of the book. The commencement of the proceedings finds Lady Mason without a solicitor of her own, and anxious above all things to dispense with one. After the service of the writ upon her, she consults her admiring neighbour, the chivalrous Sir Peregrine Orme, who naturally pronounces the solicitor a necessary evil. To that, her objection still remains. Assured that she has a warm friend in Furnival, a barrister of high repute, she visits him at his chambers, Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. On his advice she places her affairs in the hands of a solicitor he recommends, Solomon Aram, as the cleverest criminal solicitor known to Furnival. Meanwhile, the presence at her husband’s business rooms of so attractive a client excites Mrs. Furnival’s suspicions in such a degree that a series of domestic scenes is only closed by the lady leaving the family roof in Harley Street. The immediate sequel is given with Trollope’s happiest humour. The housekeeper predicts misery for the barrister if his wife remains inexorable, but is at once told by the butler that their master would live twice as jolly without her, and that it would only be “the first rumpus of the thing.” Is it not, reflectively asks the novelist, the fear of the “first rumpus” which keeps together many a couple. Even the special and manifest pains taken with them do not, as Trollope himself felt, entirely redeem the trial chapter from the charge of anti-climax.