CHAPTER VI

ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE AND HIS OWN

Maternal influence in the Barchester novels--Trollope’s first literary success with _The Warden_--The Barchester cycle begun--Origin of the _Barchester Towers_ plot--The cleric in English fiction--Conservatism of Trollope’s novels--Typical scenes from _The Warden_--Hiram’s Hospital--Archdeacon Grantly’s soliloquy--Crushing the rebels--Position of the Barchester series in the national literature--Collecting the raw material of later novels--The author’s first meeting with Trollope--The novelist helped by the official--Defence of Mrs. Proudie as a realistic study--The Trollopian method of railway travelling--A daily programme of work and play.

At each successive stage of Anthony Trollope’s literary advance, what he wrote was, throughout his Post Office days, suggested by no premeditated adventurous effort or mission such as produced the Dotheboys Hall chapter in _Nicholas Nickleby_, but was coloured and conditioned by the shifting circumstances of his daily routine. His surroundings, whatever for the time they may have been, provided his theme. Out of past reminiscence, when not from present observation, grew his personages. It was not in his nature to live two lives, one that of a Post Office servant, the other that of an author. He made a single life subserve two ends, one official, the other literary. To this must be added the twofold obligation to his mother visibly pervading the works that are now being examined, as the earliest and most stable foundation of his fame. From the clerical preferences shown in _The Vicar of Wrexhill_ he imbibed his dislike of evangelicalism and its representatives. Mrs. Trollope too, by early initiating him into the mysteries of feminine character, imparted to him the skill in feminine analysis displayed throughout each of his stories that won real and lasting popularity. Frances Trollope’s appreciations of national character and of its individual instances invest her book about France with a grace, charm, and literary effect generally wanting to her _Domestic Manners of the Americans_. Her sympathetic insight into French life and thought attracted her son to the same subjects, and go some way towards explaining the choice of a theme for his third novel, _La Vendée_. That book brought its author the first money he ever made by his pen, £20.

Except perhaps the cultured and gracious High Churchmanship of the character which gives the story its name, nothing of parental inspiration can be seen in the general temper, the subject-matter, the _dramatis personæ_, or their settings, of the book that, following _La Vendée_ after an interval of five years, first raised its writer to a recognised place among the novelists of his time. This was _The Warden_. Its glimpses of cathedral close, cloister, and of their dignitaries at duty, or in the private ease of their own homes, owe nothing, whether as regards treatment or feeling, to Mrs. Trollope’s evangelical caricatures. Equally independent are they, on the one hand, of Mrs. Sherwood’s Low Church delineations, or, on the other, of the romances by which Elizabeth Missing Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge rendered lasting service to the Anglican movement in the nineteenth century’s second half. Trollope himself always disclaimed any special first-hand intimacy with clerical life or exclusively clerical society. As a fact, however, something of the sort had been always familiar to him, if not from personal experience, still from family tradition. His ancestor, a London merchant’s son, eventually a dignified and well-known Berkshire vicar, might easily, if studied from his portraits alone, have suggested particular features and whole personages for the Barchester gallery. In connection with the course of its author’s general development, now being traced, _The Warden_ is a real landmark for other reasons than that it formed his earliest introduction to the public as a novelist who had not mistaken his calling and whose works must be read. It was his fourth attempt at fiction, and enabled him to place before his readers some lineaments and traits of his most original and best-liked creations. Its way, however, to popularity was won by slow degrees. While opening the Barchester series, _The Warden_ did not complete its growth into world-wide favour till that series had advanced some way.

Apropos of his real start with this book, Trollope, in 1856, told Lord Houghton that only 750 copies were printed, that they remained over ten years in hand, but that he regarded the book with affection because, after having previously written and published for ten years to no satisfactory purpose, he had made £9, 2_s._ 6_d._ by the first year’s sale. “Since then,” he added with quiet satisfaction, “I have improved even upon that.” From the biographical point of view necessarily taken in these pages, _The Warden_ is specially interesting from being the second full revelation of its author’s attitude to life and character at the dawn of his literary success. The pervading temper of _The Warden_ closely resembles that previously shown in _La Vendée_, and may therefore be described as one of social, moral, and intellectual conservatism. In the English story, the personal contrasts of ecclesiastical life making up most of the book were suggested, after the fashion described by the author, during a summer ramble in Salisbury Close. That, however, was not the way in which he came by the notion, not only of _The Warden_, but of _Barchester Towers_ as well.

Both novels, in Trollope’s own words to the present writer, grew out of _The Times_ correspondence columns during a dull season of the fifties. The letters raised and argued, for several days or weeks together, the controversial issue whether a beneficed clergyman could be justified in systematic absenteeism from the congregation for whose spiritual welfare he was responsible. The ecclesiastic who had supplied the subject for this newspaper discussion was first vehemently attacked by open enemies or candid friends; he then received the best defence possible from zealous partisans; and so, after an empty bout of argument, the matter ended. With Anthony Trollope it had only just begun. The whole question appealed strongly to his natural turn for social casuistry, especially of the more disputatious sort. The disclosures of personal motive, rivalry, and object, as the discussion widened and advanced, were personified by his imagination in a company of concrete forms. The leading journal’s letters came from many different persons, and combined every possible variety of opinion. None of the correspondents were known to the novelist, while his creative touch was secretly endowing them with the nature, the habit, and the form that was to give them something like immortality in his pages. Who, he had asked himself, were these _Times_ letter-writers in private life; what manner of men did they seem to their associates in the Church and the world, to their families at home, to their friends abroad? The mental answers to these questions, elaborated by him during his official progress throughout the country, resulted in the bodying forth of things unknown, clerical or lay.

Thus did strong imagination, as Hippolyta puts it,[9] call for the first time into existence beings who, though now belonging to a past order, for the Victorian age were as full of actuality as Septimus Harding and Archdeacon Grantly, and who will be scarcely less useful to the nineteenth-century historian than, in their pictures of the early Georgian epoch, both Lecky and Macaulay found Congreve’s Parson Barnabas, Fielding’s amiably evangelical Parson Adams, and his antithesis Parson Trulliber. With those personages there are no creations in the Barchester novels that can be compared. And this for the sufficient reason that Fielding, like Congreve, aimed at reproducing with the pen the vigorous effects of George Morland’s brush. Trollope, on the other hand, had no sooner advanced some way with _The Warden_ and the stories which followed it than he had satisfied himself that his most successful and congenial line was that of light-comedy narrative. The social atmosphere breathed, and the men and women brought before us in the Barchester novels are not dominantly, still less exclusively, clerical. Some of the most popular types are introduced chiefly for the purpose of connecting the more or less ecclesiastical fictions that followed _The Warden_ with the panorama of Church dignitaries that formed Trollope’s early speciality. Even in _Barchester Towers_ several of the sketches most conspicuous for inherent vitality are altogether lay. The Stanhopes, and of these the Signora above all, who makes of her sofa a throne before which the Barchester manhood prostrates itself, Mrs. Bold with her genuine or pretended lovers, form the purely secular background against which the Quiverfuls of Puddingdale, the Crawleys of Hogglestock, are thrown out in strong, sometimes painful, but always effective, relief.

As in _The Warden_ Archdeacon Grantly leads the way to _Barchester Towers_, so in _Barchester Towers_ Mr. Arabin, Fellow of Lazarus, Oxford, links that novel to _The Last Chronicle of Barset_; while the Thornes of Ullathorne open the way to _Doctor Thorne_, Squire Thorne’s cousin, the social and medical oracle of Greshamsbury Manor, not far from Gatherum Castle, whose owner, the Duke of Omnium, is to be the central figure in the political novels. As to _Doctor Thorne_, the heroine, Mary Thorne, if not quite such a masterpiece as Miss Dunstable, combines with the Scatcherd portraits to explain the abiding and even growing popularity of this really great novel. What Trollope’s sympathies were in _La Vendée_, such they showed themselves, not only in _The Warden_ but in all his subsequent dealing with social and political topics. “Ask for the old paths, where there is the good way, and walk therein, and find rest therein.” The Hebrew prophet’s words[10] might have furnished Trollope with a congenial text for a lay-sermon that would have summed up all his convictions and have reflected, as in a mirror, the essential and deep-rooted conservatism of his mind. At the General Election of 1868, indeed, Trollope was to stand as a Liberal for Beverley. His training in the Civil Service had long since deepened his distrust of innovation and his hearty resistance to whatever savoured of new-fangled ideas. At the Post Office, whether serving under Whig or Tory chiefs, he always stood for the straitest traditions of the department. He showed himself as obstinately conservative in the traditions of its routine as his natural tone of mind, fortified by his mother’s precepts and prejudices, had caused him to be in politics.

As a clerical portrait-painter Trollope produced his work in advance of George Eliot by four years. Nothing but mutual dissimilarity can be found between the two schools in which they were respectively trained for the work. Nor had George Eliot ever lived in Trollope’s exclusive social environment. Yet Mr. Irwine, in _Adam Bede_, in his refined vicarage, with his high-bred mother for housekeeper, might be claimed as a distant relation by Archdeacon Grantly, notwithstanding the diametrically opposite associations and experiences of the two novelists. With George Eliot, its Irwines imparted to the Church a grace and sweetness that made itself felt even by Dissenters and infidels. “Imagine,” Anthony Trollope seems to murmur in a series of audible asides, “the curse of a religious establishment that took its tone not from the Grantlys but the Slopes.” _The Warden_, like the rest of the series it opened, is too universally familiar to need any analysis of its characters or its incidents here. It contains, however, certain passages which strike the social keynote of its author’s personal predilections in matters connected with ecclesiastical polity. The portions of the book now referred to show, in such clear-cut sentences, so unambiguously and picturesquely, their author’s fondness for the old _régime_, notwithstanding, if not almost because of, its defects, that a few extracts from them will recall more clearly his standpoint in the Barchester books than could be done by pages of description or comment. About Septimus Harding himself nothing need be said. St. Cross Hospital, the original of his Hiram’s Hospital, lies about a mile from Winchester in the Twyford direction. Its chief custodian might naturally therefore be a Wykehamist. Could anything, therefore, so gentle have come from the college of St. Mary Winton? Anthony Trollope would have answered “Yes,” and did indeed once call _The Warden_ an idealised photograph, whose chief features were, by an eclectic process, taken from more than one member of the Sewell family whom, if he had first seen at Winchester, he only came to know well and observe closely when visiting New College, as his brother’s guest.

Equally realistic was the genesis of the principal figures grouped round the Warden. They comprise such old friends as his devoted daughter Eleanor; John Bold, her declared lover, who is denounced by the masterful Archdeacon as an enemy of the Establishment, but whom Mr. Harding is not unwilling to take for his second son-in-law; the inmates of the hospital themselves; the grateful Bunce, the Warden’s favourite and champion; Abel Handy, who leads the rebels and malcontents; Mr. Chadwick, whose family have supplied the Bishops of Barchester with stewards from time immemorial; the local man of business enlisted on behalf of the _status quo_; and, in the background, the London advisers of the Warden’s friends, Cox and Cummins, who recommend Mr. Harding to seek an interview with that very eminent Queen’s Counsel, a thorough Churchman, a sound Conservative, in every respect the best man to be got, Sir Abraham Haphazard. When in due course that conference has been obtained, Trollope’s portrait of the legal pundit is at one or two points reminiscent of that sound lawyer, notwithstanding his life’s failure, his own father. There is also a paternal touch in the portrait of Mr. Harding himself. The Warden’s sumptuous treatise on church music recalls Thomas Anthony Trollope’s erudite work, the _Encyclopædia Ecclesiastica_, mentioned to, if not encouraged by, John Murray, but never issuing from Albemarle Street.

Anthony Trollope’s style has been said by twentieth-century critics to lack distinction. But the various pictures of Dr. Grantly’s intervention in the hospital affairs have the strength, the certainty, and the ease of touch which declared in every line the observant humorist. In the pages to which the reader will presently be referred, Trollope shows his constitutional liking for the old, well-to-do, gentlemanlike Erastianism of the Establishment not by any generalities of comment or of moral reflection, but by narrative and descriptive diction as direct, graphic, and significant as any that ever came from his own or from any other contemporary pen. Archdeacon Grantly is on his way to Hiram’s Hospital; noting the signs of picturesque prosperity around him, he thinks with growing bitterness of those whose impiety would venture to disturb the goodly grace of cathedral institutions. The Archdeacon’s complacency has at once been deepened and has developed a new sensitiveness by the mutiny among Hiram’s almsmen, for the purpose of quelling which he is now on his way to the hospital. The ringleaders have not organised the movement without some opposition. The petition to the diocesan authorities setting forth their grievances has only secured signatures with some difficulty. The hundred a year claimed by the almsmen as their right seems to several more likely to be plundered by their children or belongings than to benefit themselves. The Handy and Skulpit faction has, however, now been put on its mettle, and already snaps its fingers at the resistance of the powers that be, “especially old Catgut with Calves to help him”--otherwise Mr. Harding with his violoncello, and his son-in-law, in his ecclesiastical war paint.

All these things are well known to the Archdeacon, with whom, as the representative of Anglican orthodoxy in its most attractive form, Trollope makes it plain enough what his own sympathies are. Who, our author asks, would not feel charity for a prebendary, when walking the quiet length of that long aisle at Winchester, looking at those decent houses, at that trim grass plat, and feeling the solemn, orderly comfort of the spot? Or who could be hard upon a dean, while wandering about the sweet close of Hereford, and owning that here solemn tower and storied window are all in unison and all perfect? Again, who could lie basking in the halls of Salisbury, gaze on Jewel’s Library, and on that unequalled spire, without feeling that bishops should sometimes be rich? Looking upon this pleasant scene almost with a proprietorial interest, the Archdeacon had answered his father-in-law’s question, Why shouldn’t they petition? with a brazen echo of the inquiring words and a remark that he would like to say something to them altogether, and let them know why they shouldn’t.

Poor Mr. Harding is equally terror-stricken at this first threat of what is coming, and at his relative’s later insistence on the Warden’s company upon the occasion. And now the eventful afternoon has come; the hour has struck. See the Archdeacon as, in Trollope’s picture, he stands up to make his speech. Erect in the middle of that little square, he looked like an ecclesiastical statue placed there as a fitting illustration of the Church militant here on earth; his shovel-hat, large, new, and well pronounced, a Churchman’s hat in every inch, declared the profession as plainly as does the Quaker’s broad brim; his heavy eyebrow, large, open eyes, full mouth and chin, expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered with fine cloth, told how well-to-do was its estate. One hand ensconced within his pocket, he evinced the stubborn hold which our mother Church keeps on her temporal possessions. The other loose for action, was ready to fight, if need be, in her defence. Below these the decorous breeches and neat black gaiters, showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened the grace, the decency, the outward beauty of our church establishment. Thus much for the orator.[11] The speech that follows, read at full length in the original text, will be admitted to justify every word said about this episode here. It is also to be noticed that, within less than ten years of his earliest essay in fiction, Trollope had touched the high-water mark of his literary excellence. As regards terseness and picturesqueness combined, he never afterwards described any scene with more power and felicity than Dr. Grantly’s address to the insurgent almsmen, and his father-in-law’s inward misery while he is compelled to stand by and listen.

Greater writers than Trollope have failed always to be sure of doing their best work, as indeed they have themselves been the first to admit. “I consider,” said Murray to Byron, “about half of your _Don Juan_ to be first-rate.” Disclaiming that measure of praise, the poet continued: “Were it as you say, I should have surpassed Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare; for about which of these can it be said that half of his work was up to the highest level of his power?” If throughout the rest of _The Warden_, and in its Barchester successors, Trollope had kept up the concentration of thought, the close packing of graphic phrase, and the general exercise of brain-power at the same point as in the specimens now given, he might have left behind him portraits scarcely less instinct with immortality than David Copperfield, Micawber, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, or, passing to the rival of him who created these, Arthur Pendennis, Clive, Ethel, and Colonel Newcome. Even as it is, the succession of works beginning with _The Warden_, ending with _The Last Chronicle of Barset_, and taking just twelve years for their production, will bear comparison with all but the masterpieces of Trollope’s greatest contemporaries. They will, that is, find a place only a little below _The Newcomes_ and _Our Mutual Friend_ or George Eliot’s _Middlemarch_. Among the fathers of English fiction, Trollope ranks with Richardson for novelty of ideas and genuine originality of characters. His portraits may exaggerate personal features, but the more important of his creations are met with in his pages for the first time. Good or bad, excellent or mediocre, his Barchester men, women, and children are in all their lineaments his own.

Among those figuring in Messrs. Longmans’ authors’ list during the fifties was the Rev. James Pycroft, author of _The Cricket Field_, as well as one or two stories. Pycroft’s opinion was justly valued and sometimes asked by William Longman. Apropos of _The Warden_, soon after its publication Pycroft said to Longman: “Here at least you are breaking new ground. Novels of adventure, of naval or military life, and of politics by Plumer Ward’s successor Benjamin Disraeli, must be at a discount. But the domestic economy of the Church, as it is sketched here, is absolutely virgin soil. Let your new author stick to that; so will he add to your wealth and, if he have staying power, build up his own fame.” That judgment of a clerical and literary expert, duly conveyed by the verdict of the publisher to the author, was followed in 1858 by _The Athenæum_ calling _The Warden_ a clever, spirited, sketchy story, upon the difficulties surrounding that vexed question, the administration of charitable trusts. Here was enough encouragement for Trollope to write, and for Longman to publish, _Barchester Towers_; for that, the author did not go more out of his way specially to make any clerical studies than for _The Warden_. He had, to quote his own words to the present writer, “seen a certain amount of clergymen on my Post Office tours, just as I had seen them before at Harrow or Winchester; I think too I may have inherited some of my good mother’s antipathies towards a certain clerical school. But if I have shown any particular knowledge of or insight into clerical life, it has been evolved from knowledge of the world in general, varied experience, real hard study, and a serious course of self-culture. And, I most emphatically add, not from special intimacy with one, or indeed any, cathedral precinct and its personages. Take my Barchester. Here and there may be detected a touch of Salisbury, sometimes perhaps of Winchester. But what I am conscious of having depicted is the Platonic idea ([Greek: idea]) of a cathedral town; after all,” he added, “in clerical nature of either sex there is a great deal of human nature. Humanity varies infinitely in its outer garb; its inward heart is much about the same everywhere. Aproned prelates and gaitered deans, with their domestic belongings, are much as the middle-aged gentlemen who are the heads of purely secular households. Is there as close a family likeness between my different Barchester books as there used to be between the successive instalments of _The Naggletons_ in _Punch_; and is Mrs. Proudie more ecclesiastical because she possesses to an usual degree the petticoated intermeddler’s capacity of making her husband’s life a burden to him? Dickens gibbeted cant in the person of Dissenters, of whom I never knew anything. I have done so in Mr. Slope, an Anglican, but the unbeneficed descendant of my mother’s Vicar of Wrexhill.”

The twelve years separating _The Warden_ from _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ produced fifteen novels. Of these, six were variations on the Barchester theme, nine placed the reader among scenes and persons entirely new. Among the characters thus introduced to the public were some who soon became as real as their author, and whose names to-day are at least as familiar as his own. Trollope was often accused of exaggeration in the case of his Barchester folk. He met the charge in this way. “If you look at them as likenesses of persons seen in the everyday life of cathedral towns, or in their little ecclesiastical worlds elsewhere, it may be so. But from my point of view their ecclesiastical setting is merely an accident. Take them for what I meant them--typical actors and actresses in the comedy of life on the domestic and provincial stage--where am I guilty of extravagance or caricature? _Cucullus non facit monachum._ A man may wear a black coat and white choker, and clothe his nether limbs in priestly gear, without losing his idiosyncrasies as a human being. As Sam Slick said, there is a great deal of nature in human nature; even, he might have added, among the clerical class. I costumed and styled my people ecclesiastically for the sake of novelty. Beyond that I never intended my clerical portraiture to go.”

While making his studies and arranging his materials for the stories of English life that will bear comparison with Jane Austen, he did a good deal of reading, chiefly with a view of generally equipping himself for magazine and perhaps even newspaper writing. At the great world show in Hyde Park of 1851 he humorously proposed to exhibit four three-volume novels, all failures, but together furnishing a conclusive proof of industry. That was before the one-volume success of _The Warden_. The triumphant discovery of the line in which he could command success did not dispel some misgivings as to the dropped stitches and the blank places in his education. These weak points must be seen to without delay. So he sets his mother and his brother Tom certain pieces of research work to do. First they were to hunt up thirteen names, not biblical, of personal forces in the world’s history, beings of unquestionable genius--great men, great women, great captains, and great rebels. With the exception of the relatives now mentioned, Trollope certainly never requisitioned friend or kinsfolk in this way. Throughout his life he had two fears: first, lest he should write himself out; secondly, lest the intellectual nourishment he took in should be unequal to the creative effort of pen that he put forth. Hence, whether in Ireland, in Essex, or in London, he always had a regular supply of books from Mudie’s. These, if he did not look into them, he expected his wife, his niece, or some other member of his home circle to read and to talk about to him. But in England, as in Ireland, it was the Post Office servant who made the novelist.

While that process was going forward I first became known to Anthony Trollope. Living, as a child, with my parents at Budleigh Salterton in South Devon, I found one day the morning’s lessons interrupted by the announcement that a strange gentleman who seemed in a hurry desired to see my father at once. The visitor, then on his Post Office rounds in the west, and known as the author of _The Warden_, and the visited had not seen each other since the days when they were schoolboys at Winchester together. The stranger, I can just recollect, as I watched him at our midday dinner, seemingly added to his naturally large dimensions by a shaggy overcoat, or it may have been a large, double-breasted pea-jacket, making him look like one of those sea-captains about whom in the fifties we used to hear a great deal on the Devonshire coast. Penny postage, with all its intended benefits, was then, it must be remembered, on its trial. Every corner of the western counties had been, or at the time referred to was being, travelled over by Trollope for the purpose of ensuring the regular delivery of letters throughout the kingdom, of inquiring into all complaints, with a view of investigating the circumstances and removing the cause. This official pilgrimage was for two reasons a landmark in Trollope’s course, literary and official. It gave him all that he wanted in the way of human varieties for peopling not only the pages of _The Warden_ but, in their earlier portions, of the other Barchester books. Secondly, it enabled him to show that the public department he had entered as a youth of nineteen had now no more active, alert, and resourceful servant than himself. He had for some time reported the usefulness of roadside letter-boxes in France, and advised their being tried in England. His proposal was experimentally adopted. On his suggestion of the exact spot for the purpose, the first pillar-box was erected at St. Heliers, Jersey, in 1853.

Four years after having created that monument of his official zeal and skill, he improved on his success with _The Warden_ by the appearance, in 1857, of _Barchester Towers_. On the additions made by this new story to the group first seen in _The Warden_, it is needless here to dwell. Mr. Slope again illustrates Trollope’s hereditary dislike of the average evangelical clergyman. As for Slope’s patroness, Mrs. Proudie, Trollope’s apology for her may be given here in his own words. These were first addressed to the already mentioned James Pycroft, William Longman’s friend. “Before you put her down as a freak of fancy, let me ask you one question. Review the spiritual lords and their better halves such as you have known, and tell me whether it is the bishop or the bishop’s wife who always takes the lead in magnifying the episcopal office? If you and I live long enough, we shall see an indefinite extension of the movement that has already created new sees in Manchester and Ripon. In the larger and older sees there will be a cry that the diocesan work is too heavy for one man; then will come the demand for the revival of suffragan bishops. You now speak about the higher and lower order of the clergy; you will then have a superior and inferior class of prelates. If at some great country-house gathering there happen to be a full-grown wearer of the mitre and his episcopal assistant, you may expect to hear the hostess debating whether the suffragan should have his seat at the dinner-table when the guests sit down, or whether his chief might not prefer that he should come in afterwards with the children and the governess to dessert. He, good easy man, may take it all meekly enough, but not so his lady. When the suffragans are multiplied, human nature will undergo some great revolution if the suffraganesses do not contain a good many who are as fussy, as officious, as domineering, and ill-bred as my chatelaine of the Barchester palace.”

“Boy, help me on with my coat.” Those were the only words I can recollect Trollope addressing to me on the occasion just described. It was not until the earliest years of my London work, that I heard his voice again. He had then settled in or near London, and had vouchsafed me the beginnings of an acquaintance which a little later was to grow into an intimacy ended only by his death. During the seventies, my occupations took me a great deal about different parts of the United Kingdom. One November day, at Euston Station, he entered the compartment of the train in which I was already seated, on some journey due north. Just recognising me, he began to talk cheerily enough for some little time; then, putting on a huge fur cap, part of which fell down over his shoulders, he suddenly asked: “Do you ever sleep when you are travelling? I always do”; and forthwith, suiting the action to the word, sank into that kind of snore compared by Carlyle to a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon. Rousing himself up as we entered Grantham, or Preston, Station, he next inquired: “Do you ever write when you are travelling?” “No.” “I always do.” Quick as thought out came the tablet and the pencil, and the process of putting words on paper continued without a break till the point was reached at which, his journey done, he left the carriage.

Several years later, when recalling this meeting, he told me that during this journey he had added a couple of chapters to a serial story. Ever since he had first turned novelist in Ireland, he had found himself too busy with Post Office work to do much in the day, too tired and sleepy for anything like a long spell of labour at night. He recollected having heard Sir Charles Trevelyan speak of the intellectual freshness and capacity for prolonged exertion felt by him when, having gone to bed an hour or so before midnight, he woke up as long after. “Never,” said Sir Charles, “did my brain seem clearer or stronger, and the work of minute writing easier or better done than when, indisposed to sleep, I went through my papers, often in the quiet which precedes the dawn.” The suggestion was no sooner made than followed. At first Trollope exactly imitated Trevelyan, and, after a short nap, worked for an hour or two, and then composed himself to slumber again. By degrees he made the experiment of taking as much sleep as he could by 5.30 A.M. Then, if he did not wake of his own accord, he was called, in his early days by his old Irish groom, afterwards by another servant. Coffee and bread and butter were brought to him in his dressing-room. Then came the daily task of pen he had set himself. This accomplished, if in London he mounted his horse for never less than a good half-hour’s ride in Hyde Park before sitting down to the family breakfast as nearly as possible at eleven. That left him with a comfortable sense of necessary duty fulfilled, and the whole day lay before him for pleasure or business, his chief afternoon amusement being a rubber at the Garrick.