What a Lady Bountiful hath Mrs. Trollope been to printers, Marlborough-street puff-factors, Wellington-street advertising columns, provineial paper-makers, and eke, we fear, to universal trunk-makers! The prosiest of utilitarians must be sensible to the weight of her claims in this economical aspect, and must reverence (in spite of his nil admirari temperament) the colossal scale on which she has employed national capital and labour. Nor is she ever weary in this well-doing, nor does she ever betray symptoms of fatigue. Again and again are novel-readers on the wrong scent, and have quite lost the trail, when asking one another, "Have you read Mrs. Trollope's last?" finding that what they supposed her most recent venture has been superseded by two or three others, and that the hypothetical "last" is neither the ultimate, nor penultimate, nor even antepenultimate, but quite an old story in the rationale of circulating libraries. And we have a profound conviction that so inveterate is this kalo or kako-ethes scribendi in her constitution—and so impressed is she with the resolution not to suffer the cold oblivion implied in the adage, "Out of sight, out of mind"—that she will be found to have taken measures for many a year to come, by which her perpetual re-appearance shall be ensured. Depend upon it, her literary executors will be entrusted with the supervision of a few bales of "copy," containing work for generations of compositors and readers yet unborn; so that novels of the approved Trollope fabric may, by a judiciously frugal rate of publication (say two or three per annum) be made to last some half-way into the next century. If, however, our prognostications should be disproved by the event, we shall console ourselves with the reflection that it was only because the novelist's will was wanting; and if we chance to survive-her, we shall battle as stoutly as ever in behalf of her power to have worked out this paulo-post-futurum. Our faith in her potentiality is illimitable. But there are such things as "foiled patentialities," as Mr. Carlyle so graphically shows[1]—and that fact must be our apology, if Time, the Avenger, should call us false prophets, or other bad names, But we must leave to the New Monthly critic of a.d. 1950 the duty of defending our hallowed memory on this score.
Satire is, perhaps, the characteristic of Mrs. Trollope's writings—satire of a hard, poignant, persevering sort, which is little akin to the more graceful raillery of Mrs. Gore, or to Thackeray's goodnatured irony. It wears an almost vicious look—goes about seeking whom it may devour—snaps at strangers—bites as well as barks, and, when it does bite, makes its teeth meet. There is nothing reserved or indefinite in its vocables; it carries no trace of "equivocal generation;" it beats about no bush, nor strives to break the fall of its victims, nor meditates excuse for its own hostility. To "damn with faint praise," it knows not; to "hesitate dislike," it scornfully repudiates. It is alien from all these refined equivoques and dissembling sarcasms which, to compass their ends,
assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.[2]
