Anthony Trollope (1815 – 1882)
One of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era.
Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession.
But he could stand up with unabashed brow and repeat with enduring audacity the same words a dozen times over — “The prosperity of England depends on the Church of her people.” Had he been asked whether the prosperity which he promised was temporal or spiritual in its nature, not only would he not have answered, but he would not in the least have understood the question.
He too, liked his party, and was fond of loyal men; but he had learned at last that all loyalty must be built on a basis of self-advantage. Patriotism may exist without it, but that which Erie called loyalty in politics was simply devotion to the side which a man conceives to be his side, and which he cannot leave without danger to himself.
Had some inscrutable decree of fate ordained and made it certain, with a certainty not to be disturbed, that no candidate could be returned to Parliament who would not assert the earth to be triangular, there would rise immediately a clamorous assertion of triangularity among political aspirants. The test would be innocent. Candidates have swallowed, and daily do swallow, many a worse one. As might be this doctrine of a great triangle, so is the doctrine of Home Rule. Why is a gentleman of property to be kept out in the cold by some O'Mullins because he will not mutter an unmeaning shibboleth? "Triangular? Yes, or lozenge-shaped, if you please; but, gentleman, I am the man for Tipperary."
When you have done the rashest thing in the world it is very pleasant to be told that no man of spirit could have acted otherwise.
When young Mark Robarts was leaving college, his father might well declare that all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition.
It is out of nature that any man should think it good that his own order should be repressed, curtailed, and deprived of its power. If we go among cab-drivers or letter-carriers, among butlers or gamekeepers, among tailors or butchers, among farmers or grazers, among doctors or attorneys, we shall find in each set of men a conviction that the welfare of the community depends upon the firmness with which they, — especially they, — hold their own.
The tenth Muse who now governs the periodical press.
There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, — and always to plead it successfully.
It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.
Each thought himself, especially since this last promotion, to be indispensably necessary to the formation of London society, and was comfortable in the conviction that he had thoroughly succeeded in life by acquiring the privilege of sitting down to dinner three times a week with peers and peeresses.
The affair simply amounted to this, that they were to eat their dinner uncomfortably in a field instead of comfortably in the dining room.
He is one of those men who, on marrying, assume that they have at last got a person to do a duty which has always hitherto been neglected.
Things to be done offer themselves, I suppose, because they are in themselves desirable; not because it is desirable to have something to do.
There are words which a man cannot resist from a woman, even though he knows them to be false.
He had never done any good, but he had always carried himself like a duke, and like a duke he carried himself to the end.
“But what made Miss Boreham turn nun?”
“I fancy she found the penances lighter than they were at home,” said the lord. “They couldn’t well be heavier.”
He possessed the rare merit of making a property of his time and not a burden.
Let a man be of what side he may in politics, — unless he be much more of a partisan than a patriot, — he will think it well that there should be some equity of division in the bestowal of crumbs of comfort.
In former days the Earl had been a man quite capable of making himself disagreeable, and probably had not yet lost the power of doing so. Of all our capabilities this is the one which clings longest to us.