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he would have held parley with the enemy, matured his plans, and gained conquest by artifice. Had he been possessed of power and high command, he was precisely the person to be imperious, overbearing, and haughty-to carry out those false notions of exclusiveism and prerogative of order with which his mind was so strongly imbued. The fates had decided otherwise, and his capabilities of exercising arbitrary influence were circumscribed, just as nature wills it that ferocious animals are less physically endowed than the more docile tribes. Mrs. Spenser wisely considered that avarice and vanity were evils which brought with them their often severe but certain corrections; she wisely deemed that humbler associations were more likely to be followed by happiness; consequently there was an opposition between the false notions of her husband and her own more unprejudiced reasonings, which not unfrequently gave rise to altercations that too often disturbed the repose of their domestic hearth.

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"You seem to suppose, Godfrey," replied she, after a short silenceyou seem to suppose that all our energies and desires ought to be directed towards the attainment of an exalted position; that in such consists our chief good. Happiness is not thus always to be found. Those matches of expediency, as you term them, are, in the majority of instances, matches of misery. Besides, the higher classes do not form the prototype of all that is to be observed; it is a mistake to look to their order for all that is estimable, or for the true enjoyments of life. It is a fact too broadly acknowledged, that with them there are, perhaps, some hidden anguish, some silent repining, and more inconstancy than in any other grade. An eminent senator very recently said, it was his opinion that there was more virtue amongst mechanics than peers! For my own part, I had rather see Alfred a happy than rich man; I had rather behold him contented in mediocrity than miserable in splendour. Never, I beseech you, exert an undue influence over him. It is your duty to kindly advise and patiently admonish, and offer such parental advice as a father's love would suggest. Were you to deceive him, his confidence would be for ever lost. You may be politic, not cunning; you might persuade, you could not force him."

This strain of reasoning was ill-suited to Godfrey's plans; it was at variance with his projects. He could not deny the truth of what had been said, but truths are not always acceptable; they do not always dovetail with worldly scheming and worldly minds. He replied, by saying,

"Well, well, my dear, what you have said is all very fine, and I dare say true; but you know, as well as I do, an unfortunate marriage would be a positive calamity to the family. It is fine talking-very, indeed!" With these words he rose from his chair, and petulantly left the

room.

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GOETHE Complained that modern poets put too much water in their ink. Of many modern novel-wrights, we may similarly, or inversely, complain that they put too little ink in their water. No wonder, then,

that the manuscript so soon becomes fade, colourless, illegible, and survives not the "first reading." Even a large piece of bullion will only supply a certain amount of gold-leaf, and cover a limited surface. Genius, too, has its boundaries. If it pass them, it must pay the penalty, and that is sometimes a heavy toll. Genius has no infinite mood. In trying to prove that it has, it becomes an irregular verb. Mrs. Trollope is one of those who, by over-writing, refuse to do themselves justice. At least, she writes too fast, and gives way too indulgently to the rash speed of her grey-goose quill, so that it sometimes, in the nature of things, leads her a wild-goose chase. Her gold-leaf is beaten too thin; her ink, though abounding in gall, is diluted with too much water. Not that we hold the impossibility of a prolific author being a great author, confronted as such a theory is by ancient and mediæval literature, belied as such an unwise saw is by so many modern instances. But there are cases in which the fecundity proves the weakness of the offspring, as well as the vigour of the parent. The talent is too widely diffused, instead of being wisely concentrated. Three or four of Mrs. Trollope's works are marked by a more terse and compact habit of thought, and show, by their superiority to the rest of the family, what she can produce when she likes. Assuredly this lady's industry and exuberance of invention entitle her to the proverbial name she enjoys, or endures, for prolific authorship. With Virgil's rustic we may admiringly exclaim:

O quoties, et quæ nobis Galatea locuta est!*

In vain have reviewers tried to keep up with her. A blue-stocking who travels in seven-leagued boots may well run critics and criticasters out of breath-she triumphantly ascending the hill Difficulty, as fresh as a daisy, while they wallow, and struggle, and give up the race (and almost the ghost) in the Slough of Despond. Pant and puff as they will to run her home, she is in a trice miles out of sight, over the hills and far away, and wondering what those sluggard lameters are doing in the rear. It was once suggested by Tom Moore,† as an expedient to keep pace with the celeritas incredibilis of certain literary Cæsars, that they should each have a reviewer appointed expressly, auprès de sa personne, to give the earliest intelligence of his movements, and do justice to his multifarious enterprises. But would one such officer suffice in the case of Mrs. Trollope? We trow not. Poor wight, he would "strike" ere the first was out; and his successor, however able-bodied and conscientious a manof-all-work, would find the accumulated arrears too much for him, protest that the place was too hard for him, and go off at a month's warning.

* Bucol. III., 72.

† In his "Edinburgh Review" of Lord Thurlow's Poems, September, 1814.

year

What a Lady Bountiful hath Mrs. Trollope been to printers, Marlborough-street puff-factors, Wellington-street advertising columns, provincial paper-makers, and eke, we fear, to universal trunk-makers! The prosiest of utilitarians must be sensible to the weight of her claims in this economical aspect, and must reverence (in spite of his nil admirari temperament) the colossal scale on which she has employed national capital and labour. Nor is she ever weary in this well-doing, nor does she ever betray symptoms of fatigue. Again and again are novel-readers on the wrong scent, and have quite lost the trail, when asking one another, "Have you read Mrs. Trollope's last ?" finding that what they supposed her most recent venture has been superseded by two or three others, and that the hypothetical "last" is neither the ultimate, nor penultimate, nor even antepenultimate, but quite an old story in the rationale of circulating libraries. And we have a profound conviction that so inveterate is this kalo or kako-ethes scribendi in her constitution -and so impressed is she with the resolution not to suffer the cold oblivion implied in the adage, "Out of sight, out of mind”—that she will be found to have taken measures for many a year to come, by which her perpetual re-appearance shall be ensured. Depend upon it, her literary executors will be entrusted with the supervision of a few bales of "copy," containing work for generations of compositors and readers yet unborn; so that novels of the approved Trollope fabric may, by a judiciously frugal rate of publication (say two or three per annum) be made to last some half-way into the next century. If, however, our prognostications should be disproved by the event, we shall console ourselves with the reflection that it was only because the novelist's will was wanting; and if we chance to survive her, we shall battle as stoutly as ever in behalf of her power to have worked out this paulo-post-futurum. Our faith in her potentiality is illimitable. But there are such things as "foiled potentialities," as Mr. Carlyle so graphically shows*-and that fact must be our apology, if Time, the Avenger, should call us false prophets, or other bad names. But we must leave to the New Monthly critic of A.D. 1950 the duty of defending our hallowed memory on this

score.

Satire is, perhaps, the characteristic of Mrs. Trollope's writingssatire of a hard, poignant, persevering sort, which is little akin to the more graceful raillery of Mrs. Gore, or to Thackeray's good natured irony. It wears an almost vicious look-goes about seeking whom it may devour-snaps at strangers-bites as well as barks, and, when it does bite, makes its teeth meet. There is nothing reserved or indefinite in its vocables; it carries no trace of "equivocal generation;" it beats about no bush, nor strives to break the fall of its victims, nor meditates excuse for its own hostility. To "damn with faint praise," it knows not; to "hesitate dislike," it scornfully repudiates. It is alien from all these refined equivoques and dissembling sarcasms which, to compass their ends,

assent with civil leer,

And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;

Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,

Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.†

Latter Day Pamphlets."

† Pope (Prologue to the Satires).

Its lines are deeply indented and coarsely grained, and do not fall on pleasant places. In anatomising her subjects, Mrs. Trollope shows no profound psychological science; in fact, her incisions are often but skindeep; but then she gashes to and fro after a terrible sort, and produces jagged wounds, and leaves unsightly scars, and seems to revel in diagrams of morbid pathology. Her illustrations are generally lively, not always truthful, and frequently farfetched. The absurdities and abuses of social life have had few sharper inquisitors, but many of abler discrimination and more practical judgment. Fools and villains are not to be shamed and reformed, or their ugliness to be made a warning, by unqualified expositions of their actual or their ideal excesses. Satire, by being too broad, too unconditional, too straightforward, defeats its being's end and aim. Its acute angles become obtuse, and its parallel lines never meet their object. According to Sir Walter Scott, the nicest art of satire lies in a skilful mixture of applause and blame: there must be an appearance of candour, and just so much merit allowed, even to the object of censure, as to make the picture natural. But in no case is Mrs. Trollope a friend to the media via. If she scolds, it must be vehemently; if she admires, it must be sweepingly—like the duke, with whom

Railing and praising were the usual themes,

And both, to show his judgment, in extremes.

In the same manner, her humourists are too often buffoons; her wit trenches on caricature; her romance goes Surrey melodramatic lengths; her comedy merges in farce. A blackguard à la Trollope is all black. In reading her fictions we are consciously en rapport with a clear-seeing and clever woman, who surprises us with the extent, the variety, and the lucidity of her visions; but we feel the while that truth and nature are sacrificed or forgotten-that the clairvoyance is a skilful delusion, the performance a make-believe, the performer a professional artiste. Sometimes, indeed, Mrs. Trollope draws from life, and supplies the finishing touches as well as the outline from the same source. But as a rule, she overdoes nature, or contrives to do without it—novis saltem judicibus.

The celebrity of that literary scandalum to the taste of Uncle Sam, "Domestic Manners of the Americans," which he reckons to " whip creation" in the article of scan. mag., was not rivalled by the accompanying novel, "The Refugee in America," with which Mrs. Trollope clenched her argument. The former was fiction enough, on American showing-it was all "tarnation romance" from beginning to end; and to follow it up by a professed work of fancy or unreality, was adding insult to injury. From the vulgarism and utilitarianism of this prosaic theme, she turned in the following year (1833) to Italy and the sixteenth century, producing "The Abbess," a romance rich in convent characteristics, love intrigues, and Inquisition unpleasantries. The same strong and pointed lance that had just run-a-muck against Yankeedom, was now couched, in the same martial and uncompromising spirit, against old abuses of ultramontanism. There is ingenuity, but no great grasp of passion or power in this tale; some of the characters are spirited, but they

* Thus Dryden's Portraiture of Shaftesbury ("Absalom and Architophel") qualifies the censure so artfully with praise of his talents, as to render his faults even more conspicuous and more hateful.-Scott's "Life of Dryden,” § 5.

are superficially drawn, and, when we close the book, they leave hardly a trace behind to recal and perpetuate the circumstances under which we "were first acquent." The author's penchant for political agitation and polemical romance, of which later years produced notable proofs in the career of Michael Armstrong and Jessie Phillips, declared itself in 1836 by the publication of the "Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jeffreson Whitlaw"-an atrocious rascal, who plays pranks to make angels weep and gentlemen swear, upon slave-hordes of what old Fuller called "God's images cut in ebony," on the banks of the Mississippi. For depicting an unmitigated scoundrel of the A 1 force-one of those male excrescences of human nature which now and then appear in paper and print-commend us to female novelists in general and Mrs. Trollope in particular, To adopt a fastidious paraphrase, she goes the entire animal. Othello peered downwards to see whether Iago had not cloven feet.* The feet of Mrs. Trollope's splendid sinners reveal the cleft-almost as deep as a well, and as wide as a church door-through patent leather and all, Wondrous is her arithmetical mastery of these impossible quantities. A good hater herself, she indoctrinates us with her principles, until the force of hating can no further go, and the sense of our incapacity to wreak summary vengeance on the objects of it becomes intolerable, and makes us scream for the police, or frantically devise other retaliatory measures. The prosperity of Mr. Whitlaw increases our repugnance to his mal-practices; and the savage relief we feel when he is at last checkmated in the game of life, by that grim old Obi crone, is positively unchristian in its ebullitions. Yet Jonathan is ably represented and other characters there are in the book which attest the writer's vigour and comprehensive skill-as Lotte Steinmark, the winsome German Fräulein, and Lucy Bligh, and Aunt Clio (great is Mrs. Trollope in the matter of aunts). In the following years “The Vicar of Wrexhill" made his celebrated début; and to this hour that clerical notoriety is considered by many-taking him and his history together-the masterpiece of his race, As usual, the story bristles with satire of the roughest, and, as usual, it excited a stormy outfrom those whom it assailed. That the Doctor Cantwell, or Tartuffe, of this work, is an exaggerated piece of moral deformity we should be sorry to doubt; and that the acrimony and heat of Mrs. Trollope's strictures en masse are offensive and immoderate we are constrained to hint. But we fancy she did the state some service by this exposé of Jesuitism in social life-this onslaught upon the morbid phases of the "Evangelical" school. So far we view it with a degree of approval similar to that we award to Sydney Smith's crusade against the Methodists,† when he laughed at the accounts of Providence destroying an innkeeper at Garstang, for appointing a cockfight near the Tabernacle, and of a man who was cured of scrofula by a single sermon, and of the poor Leather-lungs who, when he rode into Piccadilly in a thunderstorm, imagined that all the uproar of the elements was a mere hint to him not to preach at Mr. Romaine's chapel. We incline to hold with a distinguished clerical poet,

cry

that

* Oth. I look down towards his feet; but that's a fable:

I

If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.-Othello, Act V., Scene 2.

+ Works of Rev. S. Smith, vol. i.

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