What I Remember, Volume 2

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

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Some, some few, may remember the interest excited by the treatise to which the above letter refers. No doubt I could, and doubtless did, though I forget all about it, answer the question propounded by the celebrated French writer. But there was little hope of my doing it as "pointedly" as my correspondent would have done it himself. The answer, which might well have consisted of a succinct statement of all the difficulties of the position with which Italy was then struggling, had to confine itself to the limits of an article in All The Year Round, and needed in truth to be pointed. I have observed that, in all our many conversations on Italian matters, Dickens's views and opinions coincided with my own, without, I think, any point of divergence. Very specially was this the case as regards all that concerned the Vatican and the doings of the Curia. How well I remember his arched eyebrows and laughing eyes when I told him of Garibaldi's proposal that all priests should be summarily executed! I think it modified his ideas of the possible utility of Garibaldi as a politician.

Then comes an invitation to "my Falstaff house at Gadshill."

Here is a letter of the 17th February, 1866, which I will give in extenso, bribed again by the very flattering words in which the writer speaks of our friendship:—

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"MY DEAR TROLLOPE,—I am heartily glad to hear from you. It was such a disagreeable surprise to find that you had left London" [I had been called away at an hour's notice] "on the occasion of your last visit without my having seen you, that I have never since got it out of my mind. I felt as if it were my fault (though I don't know how that can have been), and as if I had somehow been traitorous to the earnest and affectionate regard with which you have inspired me.

"The lady's verses are accepted by the editorial potentate, and shall presently appear." [I am ashamed to say that I totally forget who the lady was.]

"I am not quite well, and am being touched up (or down) by the doctors. Whether the irritation of mind I had to endure pending the discussions of a preposterous clerical body called a Convocation, and whether the weakened hopefulness of mankind which such a dash of the middle ages in the colour and pattern of 1866 engenders, may have anything to do with it, I don't know.

"What a happy man you must be in having a new house to work at. When it is quite complete, and the roc's egg hung up, I suppose you will get rid of it bodily and turn to at another." [Absit omen! At this very moment, while I transcribe this letter, I am turning to at another.]

"Daily News correspondent" [as I then for a short time was], "Novel, and Hospitality! Enough to do indeed! Perhaps the day might be advantageously made longer for such work—or say life." [Ah! if the small matters rehearsed had been all, I could more contentedly have put up with the allowance of four-and-twenty hours.] "And yet I don't know. Like enough we should all do less if we had time to do more in.