CHAPTER VII

ON AND OFF DUTY ROUND THE WORLD

Chafing in harness--“Agin the Government”--_The Three Clerks_--A visit to Mrs. Trollope--Florentine visitors of note in letters and art--A widened circle of famous friends--Diamond cut diamond--Trollope’s new sphere of activity--In Egypt as G.P.O. ambassador--Success of his mission--_Doctor Thorne_--Homeward bound--Post and pen work by the way--North and south--_The West Indies and the Spanish Main_--Carlyle’s praise of it--_Castle Richmond_ and some contemporary novels--An early instance of Thackeray’s influence over Trollope’s writings--Famous editors and publishers--The flowing tide of fortune.

The high-class Civil Service official is opposed to change. Trollope’s constitutional conservatism shows itself in his sympathetic and approving tolerance of those parts and personages in the ecclesiastical polity generally held to call more than others for the reformer’s pruning-knife. At the Post Office, towards the public, and the juniors of his department, a martinet, Trollope never outgrew something of the rebel’s readiness, on the slightest provocation, to rise against the powers that be. His feud with Rowland Hill had become, during the later years of Hill’s secretaryship, the talk of the office. During something like a quarter of a century, in divers capacities and in many different parts of the world, he had proved his strenuous, varied, self-sacrificing loyalty to the public service. Yet uniform zeal for his work did not prevent him from sometimes measuring swords with his chiefs. It was _The Three Clerks_, published in 1858, which, rather than any of the socio-clerical stories, first commended Trollope to Thackeray as a story-teller. What specially attracted Thackeray to this novel was its Katie Woodward, the best specimen of an English girl which the author had yet drawn. The leading incidents passed for a satire upon the scheme of competitive examinations then advocated chiefly by Sir Charles Trevelyan, the undoubted Sir Gregory Hardlines of the story. This element of caricature, and the outspoken criticism of the highest magnates, had already roused much official and personal wrath, when the novelist crowned his offence by orally preaching to the rank and file the duty of a stout stand against the attack by the ruling powers not only on their clerkly rights but their privileges as Englishmen.

At this time the Civil Service had not become a free profession. In one of the great rooms of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope collected and told malcontents of the place that it was their duty to agitate till, outside office-hours and in all personal relationships, they were as much their own masters as if they had nothing to do with State employ. Mr. Secretary Rowland Hill was at once up in arms. The firebrand who had thus tried to inflame the worst passions of the Queen’s servants ought, he declared openly, to be dismissed. These words, and the incidents which had led up to them, eventually reached the Postmaster-General, then the second Lord Colchester, a member of the Derby Government. The inflammatory speaker was therefore sent for by the Minister, and told that the authorities of the department were anxious to be relieved of his services. “Is your lordship,” meekly asked Trollope, “prepared to dismiss me?” In reply Lord Colchester, who, with his father’s Eldonian Toryism, combined a certain sense of humour that his father did not possess, smiling oracularly, deprecated any recourse to extremities. From that portion of his long duel with Rowland Hill, Trollope consequently came forth with flying colours.

After such a triumph over his chief adversary, he thought he might allow himself a little holiday. His mother still lived at Florence. This town, though not becoming the national capital till 1864, had long been among the most cosmopolitan, interesting, and pleasant of social centres in Europe. Many of the names best known in Anglo-Saxon letters and art on both sides of the Atlantic were habitual visitors or occasional residents. England had its representatives in Elizabeth and Robert Browning, at their beautiful villa, Casa Guidi, its outside a thicket of flowers whose fragrance could be scented from afar, its interior a jungle of carpets and tapestry such as Clytemnestra might have bade her lord to tread on his return from Troy. Among other notable figures were E. C. Grenville Murray, of whom more will be said hereafter, and Charles Lever, then recently appointed vice-consul at Spezzia. In 1867 Lever became consul at Trieste, but neither his earlier nor his later office prevented his constant reappearance among those acquaintances on the Arno with whom, almost up to the time of his death in 1872, he appears specially at home and at his best in or out of his native Dublin.

One memorable experience Anthony Trollope brought away from his visit to his mother at Florence. She took him to see Walter Savage Landor at Fiesole. Their host some years earlier had appeared in _Bleak House_ as Boythorn, greatly, as was said, to his own indignation. As a fact, none received more pleasure from the sketch than Landor himself. “Dickens,” he said to young Trollope, “never did anything more life-like than when he portrayed my superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness.” He then told his visitors on no account to miss reading two works which he had recently taken up, and had indeed to some extent rediscovered. One of these was Hope’s _Anastasius_; the other was the work[12] by which Trelawny had made his name, just a generation before Byronic associations widened his notoriety, largely developed his anecdotal vein, and qualified him for sitting to Thackeray for the portrait of Captain Sumphington. Of other famous Anglo-Florentines Trollope saw much not only then, but afterwards. For the _Bleak House_ incident just described, exactly as I heard it from them, I am indebted to two of these, the future Lord Houghton, then Monckton Milnes, and Edward Smythe Pigott, who died, on the eve of the twentieth century, dramatic censor, but at the time now looked back upon was a brilliant young man of an old Somerset stock and of some fortune, just plunging into literature and journalism. The acquaintance thus begun gradually ripened into a lifelong intimacy. This gave Pigott the distinction of being one among the very few who can have been almost simultaneously consulted, by two nineteenth-century novelists so well known as Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, about developments of plot and character in at least two stories by each of these writers that eventually appeared about the same time.

Through some of those already mentioned, Trollope made two interesting additions to his acquaintances, either of which would have sufficed to make his stay in Florence a thing to be remembered. One of these was R. C. Trench, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, then on his Italian travels; the other was Frederick Leveson-Gower, the late Lord Granville’s brother, to whom he became subsequently indebted for much of his insight into parliamentary and party matters, all utilised by him to the full in his later political novels. Among the brethren of the brush on pilgrimage to the capital of Italian art, J. E. Millais, long afterwards to become Trollope’s friend and illustrator, was in Florence during Trollope’s visit, but did not meet him then. Frederick Leighton and G. F. Watts, however, were both for the first time seen by Trollope more than once during a foreign trip, marking a distinct stage in his intellectual growth. Watts at this time was a painter of established renown, having executed his Westminster Hall cartoon of Caractacus in 1843. Leighton had made his mark more recently, though it was on another Italian trip some years before Trollope saw him that he had gathered local colour and inspiration for his great picture of “Cimabue’s Madonna carried in procession through the streets of Florence,” and bought by Queen Victoria in 1855.

In Florence too, when Trollope first saw it, were also other men of mark and interest, with whom the acquaintance, then first made, grew afterwards in England to familiar friendship. The first and only Lord Glenesk, at that time Algernon Borthwick, proposed Trollope for the English Club. When the two men dined there for the first time together, they were joined by another famous Anglo-Tuscan, the then renowned correspondent of _The Morning Post_, James Montgomery Stuart, always full of good stories, especially about the twin literary leaders and rivals at the time, Carlyle and Macaulay. One was to the following effect: Sixteen years after its publication in _The Edinburgh_, Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_ wiped out Macaulay’s estimate of the Prussian sovereign. Montgomery Stuart, touching on the subject to Macaulay, whom he knew well, saw his face suddenly crimson. Then came a torrent of invective against Carlyle, whose writings Stuart was told to avoid as so much poison. As a novelist, Trollope had not then gone beneath the surface for the cross-currents and the violent eddies that disturb the waters of matrimonial life. He had a rare opportunity of studying such incidents first hand during his stay under the shadow of Brunelleschi’s Duomo; for the place then was known by the French as pre-eminently the city of _les femmes galantes_, and was already not less notorious than Paris itself as the abode of Anglo-Saxon couples detached, semi-detached, or some time since wholly disunited. The already mentioned Charles Lever, whose habitual absences at Florence from his Spezzia vice-consulate would have cost him his post but for the unfailing entertainment with which his vivacious reports furnished the Foreign Office, was far from being the only old friend from Ireland to repeat on Italian soil the welcome he had given on Irish to the same visitor just a generation earlier. Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, and at least one of the Moyville Vandeleurs, all from time to time shone forth in this pleasantest of Anglo-Italian constellations.

The trip now described so brightened Trollope himself as, in my old friend Pigott’s words, to make him help Charles Lever towards keeping Florence society in good spirits. It sent him back to England with a mind full of fresh ideas and characters for his books. But at this locomotive epoch Trollope was fond of applying to his own circumstances the words of Tristram Shandy’s scullion: “We are here to-day, and there to-morrow.” Before he could settle down to another novel, he was under marching orders again. The truth is St. Martin’s-le-Grand now saw in Trollope not only a capable servant but a seasoned and tactful man of the world, with the wit to turn his cosmopolitan experiences into political as well as literary capital. The service, thought Lord Colchester, still at the head of the department, might as well get out of him, while he was there, all they could. Anthony Trollope therefore found himself told off to the land of the Pharaohs under circumstances that involve some reference to previous Anglo-Egyptian relations. A new Anglo-Egyptian treaty was wanted. The chief Irish surveyor, as Trollope then was, seemed to the rulers of St. Martin’s-le-Grand the proper person to negotiate it. From Dublin, therefore, to London, quick as steam could take him, the G.P.O. ambassador sped. Preoccupied and overcharged with official affairs, he found time in the midst of arrangements for his departure eastward, to plant the new novel which he had just planned, _Doctor Thorne_, upon a publisher, not however on the new Burlington Street house to which he had already mentioned it. Richard Bentley, having first entertained Trollope’s terms, £400 down, for the book, cried off. The figure, he said, must be reduced by at least one hundred. In the case of the man with whom he had now to deal, it would have been wiser to refuse the manuscript outright than to make any attempt at beating down the author. The novelist at once told Mr. Bentley that, having changed his terms, he need trouble himself to think no more of the matter. The miscarriage of these negotiations was to have consequences more far-reaching than could have been foreseen by Trollope himself. He at once went to Chapman and Hall, then doing their business at 193 Piccadilly. The senior partner, Edward Chapman, agreed to take _Doctor Thorne_ at its writer’s valuation. Thus began a connection noticeable alike in the annals of that publishing house and in the career of Trollope himself.

The time taken by these little matters did not prevent Trollope’s reaching Egypt on the appointed day. On his arrival at Cairo, the first thing that struck Trollope, like most other new-comers to the place, and unfamiliar with oriental sights, was the donkey-boys--who are, or were, to Cairo much what commissionaires are to London--waiting at central points to take messages and letters. Trollope had arranged for himself a little programme of travel in the Near East. He did not therefore propose lingering on the Nile a day longer than his mission absolutely required. One of nineteenth-century Cairo’s social peculiarities noticed by Trollope was the rarity of private or official addresses among native personages. Parcels and papers were left for them at Shepheard’s or some other hotel, and eventually came into their hands when they next happened to be passing that way. The manager of the inn where Trollope put up, in reply to a question about the residence or office of the Pasha’s minister with whom the visitor’s business lay, assured him that anything left at the hotel bureau could not fail to be placed before him. This did not at all accord with Trollope’s ideas. He insisted on sallying forth at once with all the documents; he had already ascertained in what direction he might encounter or at least hear of the official whom he wanted. Approaching the first donkey-boy visible in the street, he flung himself into the saddle and rode off on his errand. The desired individual, however, remained for the present out of sight.

On returning to his hotel, Trollope heard that his Excellency Nubar Bey had called, and was waiting to see him. That able and urbane Armenian statesman many years later became the Khedive Tewfik’s Prime Minister. Received by him at Cairo in the eighties, I found he had not forgotten his interviews with Trollope in 1858. Very pleasant, very conversational, but somewhat peremptory had he found the author of the Barchester novels. “It was, however,” continued Nubar, “some time before Mr. Trollope found me, I fear, quite satisfactory; even then his manner of negotiating had about it less of the diplomatist than of the author who might have meditated scolding his publisher if he did not come round to his terms, and of carrying his literary wares elsewhere.” The one difference between Nubar and his visitor was the rate of speed at which the mails should be carried between Alexandria and Suez. In pressing for a longer time than Trollope thought necessary, the Egyptian official was suspected by the envoy from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, as he himself said, and perhaps quite wrongly,[13] of wishing to oblige the Peninsular and Oriental Company rather than the British Government. The matter was soon adjusted in accordance with the English view.

While these diplomatic conversations were in progress, Trollope contrived, of course, not to neglect his writing. The fortnight he remained in Cairo sufficed for completing the novel already on hand, _Doctor Thorne_, and commencing a new story that came out a year later, _The Bertrams_. For that work, the rest of Trollope’s oriental wanderings (1858-59) provided useful and entertaining material. The Palestine scenes in that novel reflected the author’s experiences of a visit to Jerusalem and its neighbourhood. Then came the return journey home through Spain. In _John Bull_, one of the stories in _Tales of All Countries_ (1861-1870), he recorded what happened to himself during an excursion on the Guadalquivir. In Spain there were no postal treaties to be engineered, and no English Post Offices to inspect. His adventure on the Spanish river, that of mistaking a Castilian Duke for a bull-fighter, had occurred just after a little spell of work, _en route_ for England once more. The postal arrangements of Malta and Gibraltar were overhauled, with the result that private residents and business houses on “the Rock” received their letters more regularly, if not earlier, than they did before.

The period of Trollope’s excursions now described was historically memorable as that which witnessed the beginning of the Suez Canal. In the record of Trollope’s own life, his prodigious powers of writing against time, rivalled only by Mr. Gladstone’s feats, on his oratorical pilgrimages, of speaking against it, reached their culminating point. Six years before Trollope’s birth, the pedestrian record had been broken by Captain Barclay’s walk of a thousand miles in a thousand hours. At the age of forty-three Trollope was habitually performing analogous feats of endurance with his pen, and could have backed himself to cover more pages of two hundred and fifty words each in a working year than any writer of his time. The pace at which he passed from one piece of task-work to another, or rather combined several at the same time, caused the most brilliant of Trollope’s Post Office contemporaries, F. I. Scudamore, to say that nothing could give an idea of the man’s all-embracing versatility but Ducrow at Astley’s simultaneously riding half a dozen horses round the ring. Test the truth of this simile by the work of the twelve months that opened with the Egyptian mission. Of course, too, that record further reminds one that only a man endowed with very exceptional strength of brain and body could have prolonged his course to the threshold of old age without wearing himself out before.

The material for the serious love-making and flirtation pictures amid Syrian ruins, palm-trees, and deserts had been collected, but not entirely worked up, before that expedition closed. The finishing strokes were to be given during a hurried stay at Glasgow, whither he had been sent on Post Office business. So far, few men of Trollope’s social taste and literary notoriety could have made fewer personal acquaintances among the rank and file of his craft. About newspaper writers, and editors in particular, personally he knew absolutely nothing. His journey beyond the Tweed introduced him in Edinburgh to the most distinguished Scotch journalist of the day, Alexander Russel, who had made for himself on _The Scotsman_ a position at least equal to that belonging in London to J. T. Delane of _The Times_. On the Conservative side James Hannay had not then been installed at _The Edinburgh Courant_. As, however, on comparing notes in London many years after the two men found out, Hannay and Trollope had just met each other beneath Professor Blackie’s roof.

The eventfulness to Trollope of the year 1858 did not end with the incidents already recorded. He had acquitted himself so well in his Egyptian treaty-making, not less than in the tour of inspection which went with it, that on his return from Scotland he had scarcely unpacked in London before receiving orders to prepare for a voyage across the Atlantic. In _He Knew He was Right_, Mrs. Trevelyan’s father stands for a favourable specimen of a West Indian governor. The postmasters and other officials of that sort provided for our transatlantic dependencies were often not up to Sir Marmaduke Rowley’s mark. As a consequence, the British postal service in this part of the world had become disorganised, discredited, and even somewhat discreditable, besides being, at its best, irregular and ineffective. Trollope had already given repeated proof that the public service possessed no man more competent than himself for investigating abuses, for detecting failures or weak spots in a system, and for effectively reprimanding the local officials who were responsible. These congenial tasks were now once more filled to perfection. Of course, before leaving England he had held the inevitable interview with the publisher he had selected for the book that the tour was to produce. This volume, for it did not run to more, was most of it written on board ship. He had begun his work while steaming out of Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, and had still some thousands of miles to traverse. He continued it uninterruptedly amid all the other duties of his absence.

The entire copy, ready for the printer to the last comma, was in his dressing-case when the cab from Waterloo deposited the traveller at his London door. This was in the autumn of 1858. Since leaving home he had explored the chief points in the West Indies, visited British Guiana and Columbia, as well as crossed and recrossed Central America. In the course of his homeward route, for the first time he touched New York; this and the political metropolis of the States, Washington, he was, as will be shown in due order, several times to revisit. Meanwhile, his earliest experiences of the New World were recorded in a style whose spirit, ease and picturesqueness impressed publishers and readers alike with a feeling of the vigour and variety always apparently at his command. Entirely unlike anything he had yet attempted, his descriptions of South American scenery, manners, character, and of its negro population, displayed the same swiftness and sureness of realistic touch as had hitherto made the places and personages familiar to the public from his first successes pulsate with the breath and movement of life.

_The West Indies and the Spanish Main_ also had the effect of raising his reputation, not only with the public, but with the fellow-craftsmen of his own art. Thomas Carlyle in 1861 recognised its graphic power, and in characteristic terms endorsed its estimates of the black man’s place in creation. Carlyle’s compliment seemed the more welcome and unexpected because some years earlier, in 1851, the Chelsea sage had been the subject of remark anything but eulogistic by Trollope. “Surely,” he writes to his mother and brother, “eight shillings for Carlyle’s _Latterday Pamphlets_ cannot be considered anything but a very bad bargain, because the grain of sense belonging to the book is smothered in such a sack of the sheerest nonsense as to be useless.” During the earlier years of the Victorian era, the social patronage of the rich and great was still considered almost, if not quite, essential for a successful advance towards literary fame. Sir Henry Taylor, of whose relations with Trollope special mention will afterwards be made, had first introduced Carlyle both to Holland and to Lansdowne House. The Blessington-D’Orsay _ménage_ in London had ended before Carlyle had become a lion or Trollope’s great drawing-room experiences had begun. It is therefore pure fiction to speak, as some have done, of the men who wrote _Sartor Resartus_ and _The Warden_ respectively ever meeting each other or seeing Benjamin Disraeli and Louis Napoleon at Gore House.

The end of the fifties and the earlier sixties were to effect a transformation-scene in Trollope’s mature position and prospects, at once fortunate and complete. This was his connection with Thackeray, with the house of Smith and Elder, as with certain other of the members of its artistic or literary staff, above all J. E. Millais. In the October of 1860 Trollope, then officially resettled on the other side of St. George’s Channel, was dividing his time between Post Office inspection, in the northern parts of Ireland, and the composition of his third Irish novel, _Castle Richmond_. Trollope, it has been already seen, in his _Examiner_ letters for John Forster, 1848, had defended the steps taken by the English Government for the relief of Irish distress, not as adequate in themselves, but as being the best practicable under the circumstances. That opinion, twelve years later, he now illustrated with forcible and picturesque description in _Castle Richmond_. But at this point a few words must be given to the relations in which this story exhibits its author with other experts in his art then living. He had found, we already know, his earliest model in Jane Austen. During the sixties and afterwards Thackeray became his declared master. In the first place the novel shows its author going, like his greatest contemporaries, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and even Dickens himself, to Blue books for scenery, incident, and even germs of character. Trollope did not, however, as was done by Reade in _Put Yourself in His Place_, lift the contents of a State paper into any description of an existing evil, such as the excesses of trade unionism. Still less did he appropriate official or other printed matter, after the fashion of Collins, who, in _Man and Wife_, illustrated the anomalies of the Anglo-Scotch marriage laws by reproducing _in extenso_ the reports of famous trials, and supported his attack upon the malignant effects of inordinate athleticism by citing from _The Lancet_ the testimony of doctors who had given evidence that suited his arguments.

Trollope, in _Castle Richmond_, while as realistic as Collins or Reade, had assimilated his facts more artistically than either, subordinating them at every turn to the development of his characters, or rather of that development making them a perfectly natural part. Every neighbourhood, like every form of suffering and want, he describes, he had not only himself seen, but minutely studied and worked out, in his own words, as he would a sum, its true lessons. His impressions remained the more vivid because he trusted to no notes taken at the time to preserve them. For instances aptly illustrative of the exact impression he wished to convey, or of the moral he desired to point, Post Office experience and severe habits of private cultivation had made his memory serviceable enough to dispense with pocket-book and pencil. As an account at once clear, picturesque, and powerful, of the crowning calamities that came upon Ireland after the potato famine in the first half of the nineteenth century, _Castle Richmond_ will almost bear comparison with the classical records of national visitations in other ages and in other lands, whether penned by eye-witnesses, or by men whose genius enabled them to describe that of which they had only heard, with the verisimilitude of actual experience. In the first of these classes Trollope might thus nearly claim a place with Thucydides or Boccaccio, in the second with Daniel Defoe, who lived, indeed, during the great plague of 1665, but only as a child of seven years old; while to Defoe’s earlier or later rivals must be added Pliny as chronicler of the plague at Rome in the second century B.C., and, in our own day, Father Thomas Gasquet, whose pen-and-ink picture, published 1894, of the mediæval “Black Deaths,” left on the mind an impression scarcely less powerful than that produced by the author of _Robinson Crusoe_ himself.

In addition to the merits of _Castle Richmond_ as an historical novel, Trollope’s impending connection with _The Cornhill Magazine_, under Thackeray’s editorship, invests with special interest an undesigned coincidence of idea between a central feature in the plot of _Castle Richmond_ and in that of _Esmond_, published eight years before Trollope’s third Irish novel came out. Both stories show the girl’s lover as the subject of an unsought attachment conceived for him by the lady in whom he himself hopes to find only a mother-in-law. In _Castle Richmond_, the part of Thackeray’s Esmond falls to Trollope’s Owen Fitzgerald. Here, however, the resemblance ends. In _Esmond_ the mother is as completely without strength of character as without fever or force of passion, and calmly bestows her affection on the young man by way of consoling him for her daughter’s cruel indifference. In _Castle Richmond_ feminine insipidity is the daughter’s attribute, while the mother, strong to repulsiveness, deliberately tries to supplant the girl in her lover’s affections. There is this further difference too: Harry Esmond, robbed of Beatrix, finds peace and happiness in her parent, while Owen Fitzgerald, discovering Lady Clara Desmond is bent on having the heir to Castle Richmond, his own cousin Herbert, never marries at all.

A contrast in all respects to Harry Esmond’s wife, Lady Desmond stands out as the most impressive figure in the last of Trollope’s earlier novels. Her life and heart story personifies a tragic element that, though of a very different sort, marks this book as clearly as it pervades and suffuses _The Macdermots_. _On ne badine pas avec l’amour_; Alfred de Musset’s title might really serve as a motto to Trollope’s book. The beautiful girl who, from being nobody, becomes Countess of Desmond, has persuaded, or tried to persuade herself, that the marriage which brings position and title can very well dispense with love. She has no sooner acted on this principle than she finds her mistake; whether as wife or widow, to the last page of the book the misery of her desolation is unrelieved. The decline of the Desmond race, and the lonely house on a bleak moor inhabited by the last Earl’s widow, with her son and daughter, are painted with the same force of delineation as, thirteen years earlier in _The Macdermots_, had acquainted those able to judge for themselves with the coming of a new novelist of a most uncommon order. Rugged harshness and gloomy power have been recognised above as constituting the dominant note of _The Macdermots_. Qualities of the same sort contribute to invest with an air of stern melancholy rather than pathos the figure of the widow who reigns at Desmond Court in the sombre house bequeathed by her husband, entirely unrelieved by the performance of those gracious and winning philanthropies, ordained, it would seem, by Providence, by way of solacing the loneliness and lightening the shadows of bereavement. Not the stern, if passionately loving Countess, but her daughter Clara, is the one angel of good works issuing from the three-storeyed, quadrangular, heaven-forsaken old house, rumoured to cover ten acres,[14] to help the young ladies at Richmond Castle, the Miss Fitzgeralds, in the distribution of Indian corn. That was the article of food which, first prepared by Clara Desmond and her friends with their own hands in the public kitchens, had been provided by the Government for mitigating the horrors of general starvation. _Castle Richmond_ contains in Clara Desmond, as a type of pure, winning, picturesque girlhood, a worthy successor to Katie Woodward in _The Three Clerks_, as well as a fit precursor of the Lucy Robarts about to be introduced in _Framley Parsonage_.

As regards Trollope’s approaching connection with the house of Smith and Elder and their most famous man of letters, it is worth recalling that, so far back as 1848, Anthony Trollope, like others of the G.P.O. staff, had been up in arms at the rumoured invasion of St. Martin’s-le-Grand by a fresh outsider for an assistant secretaryship. This was none other than Thackeray himself, who had received the actual offer or the promise of the place from Lord Clanricarde. Trollope’s personal associations, therefore, of his subsequent editor and model, were in marked contrast to the loving admiration animating all later references to the man in whom Trollope saw his literary and personal ideal, but in whom, had Thackeray secured the position, he would have found an adversary not less detested than Rowland Hill himself. It was in the October of 1859 that Thackeray, when entering on _The Cornhill_ enterprise, received from Trollope an offer of a selection for the new magazine from his _Tales of All Countries_. The proposal brought in the shape of reply two letters, both equally satisfactory, since each of them afforded practical proof of the golden opinion, both among writers and publishers, which Trollope had now securely won. Not even excepting George Henry Lewes, no expert in his craft detected literary pretenders more keenly or exposed them more pitilessly than Thackeray. His business colleagues, Smith and Elder, like the Blackwoods and only one or two more of that day, had the gift of discovering sound promise, and of never producing anything but really good work. “Neither John Blackwood nor George Smith,” said Anthony Trollope to me many years later, “let anything worth doing slip through his fingers, rated a manuscript’s value too high or too low, or ever misjudged the humour of the hour and the taste of the public. Nor,” he added, remembering _The Warden_ days, “did, I am bound to say, William Longman either.”

Twelve years before the date now reached, a packet of closely written letter-paper slips from an unknown parsonage on the Yorkshire moors had reached the firm subsequently connected with the author of _Vanity Fair_. George Smith, the life, soul, and brains of the establishment, lost not a moment in addressing himself to the unknown budget. “From 9 A.M. to noon, afterwards, with scarcely a pause, till the lamps were lighted,” he told Trollope, who told the present writer, “I read on, absorbed in the small, clear calligraphy enshrining such strange, strong thought. Beyond doubt there had fallen into my lap a precious stone of the rarest order. In forming that opinion,” continued Smith to Trollope, “I went entirely by my own judgment, and communicated it to the author the same day.” The consequence was that, in 1847, Smith and Elder brought out _Jane Eyre_. Its unknown, shrinking writer, who could scarcely be tempted to her publishers’ dinner-table, quietly took her place in the front rank of the English authoresses.

The master-mind of George Smith still ruled the house to which Trollope had introduced himself. Smith at least had carefully read, and was favourably impressed by, Trollope’s fresh and minute insight into provincial life and character, whatever its phases, ecclesiastical indeed first, but almost equally lay. “The man,” he said, “who can draw so well country society in cathedral towns, being himself a rider to hounds, can have nothing to learn from Surtees if he touches it occasionally from the sporting side.” Smith therefore commissioned from Trollope a three-volume novel for £1000, to be run through the new magazine. At the same time, in terms of very exceptional cordiality, Thackeray personally welcomed to his pages the author of _The Three Clerks_; for Thackeray, while seeing a possible rival to Trollope as a clerical novelist in the creator of Mr. Gilfil and the Rev. Amos Barton, never doubted Trollope’s qualifications for success in fiction whence churchmen and church matters should be banished. The encouraging communication to Trollope from his new editor contained one casual expression so characteristically appropriate to its recipient that in passing it may be mentioned here. Thackeray speaks of Trollope’s having “tossed a good deal about the world.” Just twelve years after this use of that expression, James Anthony Froude put, with a slight difference, the same idea when, a little more picturesquely, he spoke of Trollope as having “banged about the world” more than most people. At the point now reached there rolled to Trollope the tide which, adroitly taken by him as it was at the flood, bore him in life from the fame he had already secured to uninterrupted fortune and wealth. That tide, after, as often happens, a slight falling off of readers on his death, has, within thirty years of that event, been followed by an undoubted revival of his popularity with twentieth-century readers, not less wide and marked than that enjoyed by him in his own age. The new epoch of the varied and industrious career thus opened provides appropriate material for a fresh chapter.