Autobiography of Anthony Trollope | Page 9

school, being a monitor, and, I think, the seventh boy. This position
I achieved by gravitation upwards. I bear in mind well with how
prodigal a hand prizes used to be showered about; but I never got a
prize. From the first to the last there was nothing satisfactory in my
school career,--except the way in which I licked the boy who had to be
taken home to be cured.

CHAPTER II
MY MOTHER

Though I do not wish in these pages to go back to the origin of all the
Trollopes, I must say a few words of my mother,--partly because filial
duty will not allow me to be silent as to a parent who made for herself a
considerable name in the literature of her day, and partly because there
were circumstances in her career well worthy of notice. She was the
daughter of the Rev. William Milton, vicar of Heckfield, who, as well
as my father, had been a fellow of New College. She was nearly thirty
when, in 1809, she married my father. Six or seven years ago a bundle
of love-letters from her to him fell into my hand in a very singular way,
having been found in the house of a stranger, who, with much courtesy,
sent them to me. They were then about sixty years old, and had been
written some before and some after her marriage, over the space of
perhaps a year. In no novel of Richardson's or Miss Burney's have I
seen a correspondence at the same time so sweet, so graceful, and so
well expressed. But the marvel of these letters was in the strange
difference they bore to the love-letters of the present day. They are, all
of them, on square paper, folded and sealed, and addressed to my father
on circuit; but the language in each, though it almost borders on the
romantic, is beautifully chosen, and fit, without change of a syllable,
for the most critical eye. What girl now studies the words with which
she shall address her lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of diction?
She dearly likes a little slang, and revels in the luxury of entire
familiarity with a new and strange being. There is something in that,

too, pleasant to our thoughts, but I fear that this phase of life does not
conduce to a taste for poetry among our girls. Though my mother was a
writer of prose, and revelled in satire, the poetic feeling clung to her to
the last.
In the first ten years of her married life she became the mother of six
children, four of whom died of consumption at different ages. My elder
sister married, and had children, of whom one still lives; but she was
one of the four who followed each other at intervals during my mother's
lifetime. Then my brother Tom and I were left to her,--with the destiny
before us three of writing more books than were probably ever before
produced by a single family. [Footnote: The family of Estienne, the
great French printers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of whom
there were at least nine or ten, did more perhaps for the production of
literature than any other family. But they, though they edited, and not
unfrequently translated the works which they published, were not
authors in the ordinary sense.] My married sister added to the number
by one little anonymous high church story, called Chollerton.
From the date of their marriage up to 1827, when my mother went to
America, my father's affairs had always been going down in the world.
She had loved society, affecting a somewhat liberal role and professing
an emotional dislike to tyrants, which sprung from the wrongs of
would-be regicides and the poverty of patriot exiles. An Italian marquis
who had escaped with only a second shirt from the clutches of some
archduke whom he had wished to exterminate, or a French proletaire
with distant ideas of sacrificing himself to the cause of liberty, were
always welcome to the modest hospitality of her house. In after years,
when marquises of another caste had been gracious to her, she became
a strong Tory, and thought that archduchesses were sweet. But with her
politics were always an affair of the heart,--as, indeed, were all her
convictions. Of reasoning from causes, I think that she knew nothing.
Her heart was in every way so perfect, her desire to do good to all
around her so thorough, and her power of self-sacrifice so complete,
that she generally got herself right in spite of her want of logic; but it
must be acknowledged that she was emotional. I can remember now
her books, and can see her at her pursuits. The poets she loved best