Trollope Reminescences. CHOICE GLEANINGS OF A LONG LIFE. (from our special correspondent. )

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 239, 28 January 1888, Page 3

Trollope Reminescences.

CHOICE GLEANINGS OF A LONG LIFE. (from our special correspondent. )

London, November 18. The Trollope family, though facile and talon tod story - tellers, were yet emphatically ephenioral writers. Mrs Trolloposenior, we are told, published no leas than 115 novels, etc., and her sons Anthony and Thomas Adolphus produced 100 and 50 re, spectively. Out of these 265 works, three alone, viz., Anthony Trollope's " Warden " nnd "Burehester Towers," and Adolphus Trollope's " La Beata," have to any extent survived what may bo termed circulating library life. It seems probable, indeed, that the elder brother Adolphus will be remembered by the future, not so much by his novels as by the volumes of entertaining reminiscences — the choice gleanings of a long and prosperous life — just issued from the presses of Messrs Bentley. Mr Adolphus Trollope, who was five years the senior of his more distinguished brother, was born in 1810. The recollections of any man during so long a period would be interesting ; and as Mr Trollope saw everything that was to be seen, his reminiscenoes are readable from the first page to the last. He does injustice to himself in saying that he is only a babbler of reminiscences. There is no babble in his abundant anecdote which is always to the point. He in particular, among all his gifted family, aaw the world. Chance and inclination combined made him a traveller, and he had Europe, and to some extent America, at his finger' ends. But none of his impressions are so delightful or so instructive as those which relate to his very early life in his native Bloomsbury. The picture of the home in Keppel-street 70 years ago gives something more than a gUmpse of a single family ; it may serve to show us how our fathers lived when the century was young. The changes in men and manner, though they are not always insisted on, strike the reader suggestively at every turn. Mr Trollope's father was a learned Chancery barrister, though.owing to certain defects of humour, as distinct from defects of character, he was not a particularly successful one. Among his disqualifications for worldly prosperity was his foolish habit of letting > blockheads know what he thought of them. He was argumentative even when he had laid aside his wig and gown j and while other whisfc players of his day only quarrelled with tnoir partners, he quarrelled with the whole table. The boys used to walk down to Lincoln's Inn to meet him after busine3s in the Courts, and to bring him home for his 5 o'clock dinner. He dined so late, as the son explains, because he was a hard-working man. On the way home the young people repeated the Latin verses they had made in the morning. It was old Mr Trollope's conception of the duty a father owed to his sons. He carried it out consistently all through. The picture of household life as drawn by the oldest son very much confirms the account of a suffering childhood which we have already had from Anthony Trollope. The boys were kept hard at work ; Adolphus used to study his Latin grammar in what, by courtesy, were termed play hours, with his father at hand to pull his hair in case he made a mistake. *' Obey, and tell iio lies," was the senior's simple code of infant morals. The nearest approach to recreation was a parental reading of "Sir Charles Grandison " to the assembled family by the light of two melancholy tallow candles, which gave all the illumination the household could afford. Wax candles at half-a-crown a pound were not to be thought of ; and there was nothing else. It has been well remarked elsewhere that, after sundown, our fathers lived in gloom. The poorest cottager nowadays reads by a botter light than the squire read by seventy years ago. At certain intervals a footman in livery came in to snuff the candles ; and Mr Trollope modestly apologises for him on the ground that he cost very little, and that his livery was at least the livery of the family.