Autobiography of Anthony Trollope | Page 7

having no means of living except
what came from the farm. My memory tells me that he was always in
debt to his landlord and to the tradesmen he employed. Of
self-indulgence no one could accuse him. Our table was poorer, I think,
than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered fortunes. The
furniture was mean and scanty. There was a large rambling
kitchen-garden, but no gardener; and many times verbal incentives
were made to me,--generally, I fear, in vain,--to get me to lend a hand
at digging and planting. Into the hayfields on holidays I was often
compelled to go,--not, I fear, with much profit. My father's health was
very bad. During the last ten years of his life, he spent nearly the half of
his time in bed, suffering agony from sick headaches. But he was never
idle unless when suffering. He had at this time commenced a work,--an
Encyclopedia Ecclesiastica, as he called it,--on which he laboured to
the moment of his death. It was his ambition to describe all
ecclesiastical terms, including the denominations of every fraternity of

monks and every convent of nuns, with all their orders and subdivisions.
Under crushing disadvantages, with few or no books of reference, with
immediate access to no library, he worked at his most ungrateful task
with unflagging industry. When he died, three numbers out of eight had
been published by subscription; and are now, I fear, unknown, and
buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile literature, the building up
of which has broken so many hearts.
And my father, though he would try, as it were by a side wind, to get a
useful spurt of work out of me, either in the garden or in the hay-field,
had constantly an eye to my scholastic improvement. From my very
babyhood, before those first days at Harrow, I had to take my place
alongside of him as he shaved at six o'clock in the morning, and say my
early rules from the Latin Grammar, or repeat the Greek alphabet; and
was obliged at these early lessons to hold my head inclined towards
him, so that in the event of guilty fault, he might be able to pull my hair
without stopping his razor or dropping his shaving-brush. No father
was ever more anxious for the education of his children, though I think
none ever knew less how to go about the work. Of amusement, as far as
I can remember, he never recognised the need. He allowed himself no
distraction, and did not seem to think it was necessary to a child. I
cannot bethink me of aught that he ever did for my gratification; but for
my welfare,--for the welfare of us all,--he was willing to make any
sacrifice. At this time, in the farmhouse at Harrow Weald, he could not
give his time to teach me, for every hour that he was not in the fields
was devoted to his monks and nuns; but he would require me to sit at a
table with Lexicon and Gradus before me. As I look back on my
resolute idleness and fixed determination to make no use whatever of
the books thus thrust upon me, or of the hours, and as I bear in mind the
consciousness of great energy in after-life, I am in doubt whether my
nature is wholly altered, or whether his plan was wholly bad. In those
days he never punished me, though I think I grieved him much by my
idleness; but in passion he knew not what he did, and he has knocked
me down with the great folio Bible which he always used. In the old
house were the two first volumes of Cooper's novel, called The Prairie,
a relic--probably a dishonest relic--of some subscription to Hookham's
library. Other books of the kind there was none. I wonder how many
dozen times I read those two first volumes.

It was the horror of those dreadful walks backwards and forwards
which made my life so bad. What so pleasant, what so sweet, as a walk
along an English lane, when the air is sweet and the weather fine, and
when there is a charm in walking? But here were the same lanes four
times a day, in wet and dry, in heat and summer, with all the
accompanying mud and dust, and with disordered clothes. I might have
been known among all the boys at a hundred yards' distance by my
boots and trousers,--and was conscious at all times that I was so known.
I remembered constantly that address from Dr. Butler when I was a
little boy. Dr. Longley might with equal justice have said the same
thing any day,--only that Dr. Longley never in his life was