THE PRIME MINISTER (107 page)

‘But there are grievances,’ said the Duke. ‘Look at monetary denominations. Look at our weights and measures.’

‘Well; yes. I will not say that everything has as
yet been reduced to divine order. But when we took office three years ago we certainly did not intend to settle those difficulties.’

‘No, indeed,’ said the Duke, sadly.

‘But we did do all that we meant to do. For my own part, there is only one thing in it that I regret, and one only which you should regret also till you have resolved to remedy it.’

‘What thing is that?’

‘Your own retirement
from official life. If the country is to lose your services for the long course of years during which you will probably sit in Parliament, then I shall think that the country has lost more than it has gained by the Coalition.’

The Duke sat for a while silent, looking at the view, and, before answering Mr Monk, – while arranging his answer, – once or twice in a half-absent way, called his companion’s
attention to the scene before him. But, during this time he was going through an act of painful repentance. He was condemning himself for a word or two that had been ill-spoken by himself, and which, since the moment of its utterance, he had never ceased to remember with shame. He told himself now, after his own secret fashion, that he must do penance for these words by the humiliation of
a direct contradiction of them. He must declare that Caesar would at some future time be prepared to serve under Pompey. Then he made his answer. ‘Mr Monk,’ he said, ‘I should be false if I were to deny that it pleases me to hear you say so. I have thought much of all that for the last two or three months. You may probably have seen that I am not a man endowed with that fortitude which enables many
to bear vexations with an easy spirit. I am given to fretting, and I am inclined to think that a popular minister in a free country should be so constituted as to be free from that infirmity. I shall certainly never desire to be at the head of a Government again. For a few years I would prefer to remain out of office. But I will endeavour to look forward to a time when I may again perhaps be of
some humble use.’

1
   (p. 14).
Pembroke table:
a table with hinged flaps supported on legs jointed to the central part.

2
   (p. 17).
the T—and the G—
: presumably the Travellers’ and the Garrick.

3
   (p. 19).
to bring his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave
: Genesis 42.38, ‘then shall ye bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave’.

4
   (p. 21).
The proper study of mankind is man
: Pope,
An Essay on Man,
II.2.

5
   (p. 24).
the old military dub
: the United Service Club, whose building now houses the Institute of Directors.

6
   (p. 25).
a stuff gown
: the gown of a junior counsel as distinct from the silk gown of a Queen’s Counsel.

7
   (p. 26).
a bencher at his Inn
: member of the self-elective body which ran the affairs of the Inn of Court.

8
   (p. 26).
that old law club, the
Eldon
: not listed in G. J. Ivey’s
The Club Directory
of 1879, but, whether real or fictional, named after the Tory Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Eldon (1751–1838), a vigorous opponent of parliamentary reform. Membership of this club would indicate deep conservatism.

9
   (p. 28).
Mr Mudie’s suspicious ticket
: books from Mudie’s circulating library, founded in 1842, bore a prominent yellow label.

10
   (p. 47).
Chronicles of her early life
: Lady Glencora is a major character in
Can You Forgive Her?
(1864–5),
Phineas Finn
(1867–9) and Phineas Redux (1873–4).

11
   (p. 51).
debarred from taking office by a domestic circumstance
: after Burgo Fitzgerald’s unsuccessful attempt to run away with Lady Glencora in
Can You Forgive Her?,
Plantagenet Palliser turns down the offer of the Chancellorship
of the Exchequer in order to take her abroad and devote time to trying to father an heir.

12
   (p. 52).
What thou would’st highly,
/
That would’st thou holily: Macbeth,
I.iv.17–18.

13
   (p. 56).
Apollinaris water
: an effervescent mineral water named after Apollinarisburg, near Bonn, and advertised in
The Times
from 3 June 1875. (See R. Mullen,
Anthony Troüope: A Victorian in His World,
London,
1990, p. 597.)

14
   (p. 63). Noblesse oblige: (French) a person of noble birth is obliged to display high principles and noble actions.

15
   (p. 63).
to assume a virtue if they had it not
: see
Hamlet,
III.iv.160, ‘Assume a virtue if you have it not.’

16
   (p. 65).
the Carlton and Reform Clubs
: the main Conservative and Liberal clubs respectively.

17
   (p. 79).
her history may be already known
to some
: see
The Eustace Diamonds
and
Phineas Redux.

18
   (p. 83).
before the war
: the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

19
   (p. 84).
Argus
: a mythological personage with a hundred eyes.

20
   (p. 92).
he has to be consulted
: before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, a married woman had few rights over the income and property which she brought to her marriage, although a previous act of
1870 secured most of a married woman’s earnings and some other categories of income as her separate property. The subject was very topical as three leading feminists, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodochan, Josephine Butler and Elizabeth Wolstonholme, had established the Married Women’s Property Committee in 1868.

21
   (p. 92). Pas si mal: (French) not so bad.

22
   (p. 92).
Her lord appeared and misbehaved
himself
: the reference is to
Macbeth,
III.iv.

23
   (p. 92).
Augean stables
: one of the labours of Hercules was to cleanse the Augean stables, which held 3,000 oxen and had not been cleaned out for thirty years.

24
   (p. 95).
out-Heroded Herod
: see
Hamlet,
III.ii.14.

25
   (p. 96).
bread and games: panem et circenses
(Latin) – Juvenal’s assessment of what was required to keep the Roman populace
happy (
Satires,
X.80).

26
   (p. 96).
a man burning Rome… for his amusement, dressed in a satin petticoat and a wreath of roses
: this comic picture of Nero may derive from one of the burlesques which were popular with early and mid-Victorian theatre-goers.

27
   (p. 98).
skilly
: thin oatmeal gruel associated with prisons.

28
   (p. 103).
the Phoenix
: Dublin Castle, the seat of the Lord Lieutenant
of Ireland.

29
   (p. 104).
The Heptarchy
: the supposed seven kingdoms founded in what is now England by the Angles and the Saxons.

30
   (p. 104).
They got over the Pope in France…They have done so in Italy
: the Four Gallican Articles of 1682 asserted the autonomy of the Church in France from Rome, and the temporal freedom of the French Crown from papal influence. In September 1870 Italian troops
took the city of Rome from the Pope, who withdrew into the Vatican.

31
   (p. 105).
Papal aggression
: the name given by Protestants to the re-establishment of the Catholic Hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.

32
   (p. 108).
coy her love
: an unusual use of the verb ‘to coy’, which was generally intransitive in Trollope’s day, and meant ‘to act coyly’.

33
   (p. m),
such a thing as
: see
Othello,
I.ii.67–70.

34
   (p. 113).
since baronets were first created
: the order of baronets was created in 1611, though the word ‘baronet’ was current before that time.

35
   (p. 114).
the repeal of the Corn Laws
…
the Ballot
: measures of reform enacted in 1846 and 1872 by Tory and Conservative administrations, against the traditional interests of the party.

36
   (p. 116).
all the glory was departing
from their house
: see 1 Samuel, 4.21: ‘And she named the child I-chabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel’.

37
   (p. 116).
Hyperion to a Satyr: Hamlet,
I.ii.140.

38
   (p. 119).
fly a kite
: raise money on a promisory note of doubtful value.

39
   (p. 130). vestigia milla retrorsum: ‘none of the footprints lead back’; from Horace,
Epistles,
I.i.75, in which the prudent fox addresses the
sick lion (in a story also known from Aesop):

me vestigia terrent

omnia te adversum spectantia, titilla retrorsum.

(‘The footprints frighten me, all leading towards your den, and none leading back.’)

40
   (p. 131).
If she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be
: a popular misquotation of lines from a poem by George Wither (1588–1667):

For, if she be not for me,

What care I how fair
she be?

41
   (p. 141).
on the safest side
: extremely cautious? The
Oxford English Dictionary
gives the sense of a person being ‘on the safe side’, but does not list the superlative form. The usage is not recorded in Partridge’s
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.

42
   (p. 143).
a crush
: a crowded social gathering.

43
   (p. 149).
the six months’ vacation
: Parliament rose at the beginning
of August, in time for the grouse-shooting, and resumed in February. The three months of the social season in London were May, June and July.

44
   (p. 150).
a gilded Treasury log
: see Aesop’s fable of the frogs who ask for a king. They are first sent a log, and when they complain that it does nothing, they are sent a stork, which eats them all up.

45
   (p. 151).
sweet music afterwards
: in E.
B. Browning’s poem ‘A Musical Instrument’, the ‘great god Pan’ cuts a reed from the river and fashions a pipe from it, since this is ‘the only way… To make sweet music’. The pipe is then unlike its kind, and ‘grows nevermore again/As a reed with the reeds in the river’. In the first edition the words ‘a reed out of
the river’ and ‘and yet… afterwards’ are enclosed in inverted commas, but these
seem to be a misinterpretation of the running quotation marks with which Trollope starts every line of dialogue. The punctuation of the manuscript is confused here, but on balance it seems as if Trollope was paraphrasing, and so the present edition follows the manuscript in not indicating an exact quotation. The Duke of Omnium applies the reference to the individual who comes to prominence in public
life. The original poem presents the social singularity of being a poet.

46
   (p. 160).
ha-ha fence
: a fence concealed in a ditch, so as to provide an uninterrupted view.

47
   (p. 162).
like Martha, troubling yourself with many things
: See Luke 10.40–42: ‘Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid
her therefore that she help me. And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.’

48
   (p. 164).
Coriolanus
: in Shakespeare’s play, Coriolanus has to court the favour of the plebs he despises.

49
   (p. 164). une grande dame: (French) a great lady.

50
   (p. 167).
the family to which one of the aspirant Prime Ministers of the day belonged
: Mr Gresham, the leading Liberal, who is Prime Minister in
Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux
and
The Eustace Diamonds,
is a member of the family of the Greshams of Greshambury.

51
   (p. 168).
a very odd story about all that, you know
: the story of her mother’s money is told in Doctor Thome (1858).

52
   (p. 169).
far niente: (Italian)
to do nothing.

53
   (p. 172).
his withers were unwrung
: see
Hamlet,
III.ii.236, ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.’

54
   (p. 173).
this or that delicious haunt of salubrity
: for example Biarritz, where the Prussian statesman met the Emperor Napoleon III in October 1865.

55
   (p. 73).
Laud’s book of sports
: the name given to the anti-sabbatarian
Declaration of Sports
(1617), because it was reissued by Charles I in 1633 when Laud was Archbishop
of Canterbury. It outlawed extreme observance of the sabbath by permitting certain sports, including archery, on Sundays. Many puritan clergy were punished for refusing to read it from the pulpit.

56
   (p. 174).
the bathers’ clothes were stolen
: a reference to one of Disraeli’s most famous attacks on Peel in the House of Commons on 28 February 1845, in a debate on the opening of letters to the
Radical Tom Duncombe by warrant from the Home Office: ‘The right hon. Gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes. He has left them in full enjoyment of their liberal position, and is himself a strict conservative of their garments.’

1
   (p. 179).
shaken the dust of Gatherum altogether from his feet
: see Matthew 10.14: ‘And whosoever shall not receive you,
nor hear your words, when you depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet’