do. This, however, is due much less to any direct effort or intention on
the writer's part, than to the unconscious self-revelation which meets the
reader on every page. No narrative could be simpler, less artificial; and
yet, everywhere, we read between the lines, and, so to speak, discover
Anthony Trollope in spite of his efforts to discover himself to us.

The truth appears to be that the youthful Trollope, like a more famous
fellow-novelist, began the world with more kicks than half-pence. His
boyhood, he affirms, was as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could
well be, owing to a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on his father's
part, and, on his own, to "an utter lack of juvenile manhood"--whatever
that may be. His father was a lawyer, who frightened away all his clients
by his outrageous temper, and who encountered one mischance after another
until he landed himself and his family in open bankruptcy; from which they
were rescued, partly by death, which carried away four of them (including
the old gentleman), and partly by Mrs. Trollope, who, at fifty years of
age, brought out her famous book on America, and continued to make a fair
income by literature (as she called it) until 1856, when, being seventy-
six years old, and having produced one hundred and fourteen volumes, she
permitted herself to retire. This extraordinary lady, in her youth,
cherished what her son calls "an emotional dislike to tyrants"; but when
her American experience had made her acquainted with some of the seamy
aspects of democracy, and especially after the aristocracy of her own
country had begun to patronize her, she confessed the error of her early
way, "and thought that archduchesses were sweet." But she was certainly a
valiant and indefatigable woman,--"of all the people I have ever known,"
says her son, "the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy";
and he adds that her best novels were written in 1834-35, when her husband
and four of her six children were dying upstairs of consumption, and she
had to divide her time between nursing them and writing. Assuredly, no son