What I Remember, Volume 2Trollope, Thomas Adolphus
History
What I Remember, Volume 2
Trollope, Thomas Adolphus
Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Trollope, Thomas Adolphus, 1810-1892
It may possibly enter into the mind of some one of those who never
enjoyed the privilege of knowing Mrs. Browning the woman, to couple
together the stupidly calumnious insinuations to which she refers in
the first letter I have given, with the admiration she expresses for
the third Napoleon in the second letter. I differed from her wholly in
her estimate of the man, and in her views of his policy with regard to
Italy. And many an argument have I had with her on the subject. And my
opinions respecting it were all the more distasteful to her because
they concerned the character of the man himself as well as his policy
as a ruler. And those talks and arguments have left me probably the
only man alive, save one, who knows with such certainty as I know it,
and can assert as I can, the absolute absurdity and impossibility of
the idea that she, being what she was, could have been bribed by any
amount of Imperial or other flattery, not only to profess opinions
which she did not veritably hold--this touches her moral nature,
perhaps the most pellucidly truthful of any I ever knew--but to hold
opinions which she would not have otherwise held. This touches her
intellectual nature, which was as incapable of being mystified or
modified by any suggestion of vanity, self-love, or gratified pride,
as the most judicial-minded judge who ever sat on the bench. Her
intellectual view on the matter _was_, I thought, mystified and
modified by the intensity of her love for the Italian cause, and of
her hatred for the evils from which she was watching the Italians
struggling to liberate themselves.
I heard, probably from herself, of whispered calumnies, such as those
she refers to in the first of the two letters given. She despised them
then, as those who loved and valued her did, though the sensitive
womanly gentleness of her nature made it a pain to her that any
fellow-creature, however ignorant and far away from her, should so
think of her. And my disgust at a secret attempt to stab has impelled
me to say what I _know_ on the subject. But I really think that not
only those who knew her as she lived In the flesh, but the tens of
thousands who know her as she lives in her written words, cannot but
feel my vindication superfluous.
The above long and specially interesting letter is written in very
small characters on ten pages of extremely small duodecimo note-paper,
as is also the other letter by the same writer given above. Mrs.
Browning's handwriting shows ever and anon an odd tendency to form
each letter of a word separately--a circumstance which I mention for
the sake of remarking that old Huntingford, the Bishop of Hereford, in
my young days, between whom and Mrs. Browning there was one thing in
common, namely, a love for and familiarity with Greek studies, used to
write in the same manner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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