Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts.
Je serai grand et toi riche,
Puisque nous nous aimerons ...
Tu seras dame et moi comte.
Viens, mon cœur s’épanouit.
Viens, nous conterons ce conte
Aux étoiles de la nuit.
He could as little see—and yet who doubts it?—that the creator of Micawber was absolutely honest in closing David Copperfield on the declaration that “no one can ever believe this Narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.” What Trollope made of Don Quixote (or of Alice in Wonderland) lies beyond my power to imagine. But the point for us is that as an honest man who lived through the vogue of Poe and Dickens and, in later times, of Ouida (who will surely, soon or late, be recognised for the genius she was), and was all the time, on his own admission, alive as anyone to the market, Trollope kept the noiseless tenor of his way and, resisting temptation this side or that, went on describing life as he saw it.
Thus, and in this easy, humdrum, but pertinacious style, he arrived, much as he often arrived at the death of a fox. He was a great fox-hunter; lumbering in the saddle, heavy, short-sighted, always unaware of what might happen on t’other side of the next fence—“few have explored more closely than I have done the depth and breadth and water-holding capacities of an Essex ditch.” He knew little of the science of the sport:
Indeed, all the notice I take of hounds is not to ride over them. My eyes are so constituted that I can never see the nature of a fence. I either follow some one, or ride at it with the full conviction that I may be going into a horse-pond or a gravel-pit. I have jumped into both one and the other. I am very heavy and have never ridden expensive horses.