THE PRIME MINISTER (109 page)

(‘I see a better path, and know how good it is, but I follow ever the worse.’)

21
   (p. 588).
Aristides
: see note 10 above.

22
   (p. 596).
Niobe
: queen of Thebes, who, even when turned to stone, continued to weep for her twelve slain children.

23
   (p. 598).
an Irish land bill
: the reform of Irish tenant law was a major subject of debate in the years in which the
action is set Although Irish tenants only obtained a small degree of protection under the Land Act of 1870, such as compensation (if evicted) for improvements they had carried out during their tenancies, landlords were worried at Gladstone’s implicit recognition of Irish tenants’ moral right to their holdings.

24
   (p. 599).
they’ve changed the name
: the college which had been founded in the
Middle Ages under the name Corpus Christi was renamed Bene’t (as it is correctly spelt) at the Reformation, after Bene’t Church (St Benedict’s) next door. It reverted to its original name between 1820 and 1826, though it continued to be thought of as Bene’t College by many, one commentator in 1828 being of the opinion that ‘the old name [Bene’t], by the way, is more respectable than the new’. See
J. P. T. Bury,
The College of Corpus Christi and of the Blessed Virgin Mary: A History from 1922 to 1952,
Cambridge, 1952, 37, pp. 3–4.

25
   (p. 602).
Bradshaw: Bradshaw’s Monthly Railway Guide,
1842–1961.

26
   (p. 611).
remembered the first Reform Bill, and had been engaged in the doctoring of constituencies ever since
: the first Reform Bill, abolishing certain rotten and pocket boroughs, instituting
the first parliamentary review of constituencies and giving the vote to many property-holders in the boroughs, was originally introduced in 1831 and passed in 1832.

27
   (p. 614).
injunction not to put his trust in princes
: Psalm 146.3, ‘Put not your trust in princes’.

28
   (p. 620).
Caesar could hardly have led a legion under Pompey
: Caesar and Pompey contended for mastery of the Roman world
in the Civil War of 49–47
B.C.

29
   (p. 621).
Pitt… took the country safely through its most dangerous crisis
: the reputation of Pitt the Younger (Prime Minister 1783–1801 and 1804–6) rested not on the importance of his legislation but on his conduct of the French wars.

30
   (p. 623).
Othello’s occupation will be gone
: see
Othello,
III.iii.361, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone.’

31
   (p. 627).
The Spartan boy did not even make a grimace when the wolf bit him beneath his frock
: in the original story, from Plutarch’s
Lycurgus,
XVIILi, it was a
fox
that the Spartan boy concealed.

32
   (p. 632).
Anne Bullen and the rest of them
: when Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor, was stripped of power in 1529 for failing to persuade the
Pope to sanction Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon,
the King took Hampton Court from him. Anne Boleyn, Henry’s next queen, was executed in 1536, and one of her successors, Catherine Howard, in 1542.

33
   (p. 658).
boody
: sulk.

34
   (p. 659).
Nestor
: the aged king of Pylos, who, having ruled over three generations of men, was deemed to be as wise and just in his advice and rule as the gods themselves.

35
   (p. 660). ne peccet ad extremum ridendus
: Horace,
Epistles,
I.1.8–9,

Solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne

peccet ad extremum ridendus, et ilia ducat.

(‘Be wise in time and turn loose the horse which has weakened with age, lest it fail at last amid ridicule, and become broken-winded.’)14

In the manuscript, Trollope indicates the beginning of the line with a capital letter:
‘ne Peccet ad extremum ridendus’.

36
   (p.
666). Niobe
: see note 22 above.

37
   (p. 667).
The man who has written Q.C. after his ñame must abandon his practice behind the bar
: on becoming a Queen’s Counsel, a barrister loses much of the excitement of court life, no longer being briefed directly by a solicitor, but brought in to conduct a case which has already been thoroughly prepared by a junior counsel.

38
   (p. 672).
A Peel may perish, or even
a Palmerston must die
: Sir Robert Peel died at the age of sixty-two after a fall from his horse on Constitution Hill in 1850, and Palmerston died in office at the age of eighty in 1865.

39
   (p. 675).
Such a regiment to march through Coventry with
: see Falstaff in
I Henry IV,
IV.ii.11–35, ‘If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a sous’d gurnet… No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I’ll not march
through Coventry with them, that’s flat’

40
   (p. 675).
an Attorney-General of my own
: the Duchy of Lancaster had a law officer called by the same title as the first ministerial law-officer of the state, to act in cases where the Duchy was a party.

41
   (p. 687).
Telemachus… Mentor
: see note 17 to Volume III.

42
   (p. 689).
Nor need you be afraid, though all the woods of Gatherum should come
to Matching
: see
Macbeth,
V.v.44–5,

Fear not, till Birnam wood

Do come to Dunsinane.

43
   (p. 690).
the needy knife-grinder who, if left to himself, would have no grievance of which to complain
: see ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife Grinder’, an anti-revolutionary poem which was widely known in the nineteenth century, and in which the ‘Friend of Humanity’ fails to
rouse the knife-grinder
to a sense of grievance, and addresses him thus:

Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance –

Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,

Spiritless outcast!

[Kicks the Knife-grinder, overturns his wheel, and exit in a transport of Republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy.] –
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin,
ed. George Canning and John Hookham Frere, 1799, p. 10.

1.
 
An Autobiography
(Oxford, 1980), p. 341.

2.
 ibid., p. 180.

3.
 ibid., p. 318.

4.
 ibid., p. 180.

5.
 ibid., p. 317.

6.
 ibid., pp. 290–93.

7.
 ibid., pp. 558–60.

8.
 ibid., p. 361.

  
9.
 Introduction to
Peneos Finn
(Trollope Society, 1989).

10.
 Letter of 31 March 1878, quoted by R. Mullen in
Anthony Trollope: a Victorian in His World
(London 1990), p. 591.

11.
 For the Married Women’s Property Act, see note 20 to Vol. I, p. 693.

12.
 Letter to Mary Holmes, 7 May 1876, in N. J. Hall (ed.),
The Letters of Anthony Trollope
(Stanford, Calif., 1983), p. 687.

13.
 
Diana of tbe Crossways
(1885),
Chapter 11
.

1.
 M. Sadleir,
Trollope: a Bibliography
(1928, reprinted Dawson’s of Pall Mall, 1964), p. 305.

2.
 
The Letters of Anthony Trollope,
ed. N. J. Hall, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif., 1983), p. 650.

3.
 
Trollope: a Bibliography,
p. 155.

4.
 
Letters,
p. 573n.

14.
 
An Autobiography
, p. 132.

15.
 ibid., p. 159.

16.
 
Letters
, p. 687.

17.
 ibid., pp. 692—3.

18.
 D. Smalley (ed.),
Anthony Trollope: the Critical Heritage
(London, 1969), p. 418.

19.
 Letter to W. A. Wright, 5 September 1878, quoted by R. C. Terry in
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
(London, 1987), p. 131.

20.
 
An Autobiography
, p. 360n.

21.
 Quoted by N. J. Hall in
Trollope: a Biography,
p. 401, from the Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy’s works, Vol. 42, p. 302.