A FRIEND OF TROLLOPE'S
SIR,—I am sorry to see Mr. Bacon anxiously hovering again around that little mare's-nest of four years ago. I wish he would apply his gifts to the solution of some genuine mystery. There is not, there never was, any mystery here. Trollope's note to Miss Dorothea Sankey, written ir. brisk commercial jargon, was obviously the continuation of a joke. The only question is whether the joke wasn't rather a poor one. To see any harm in it, to take it seriously, is absurd. Even if there were any reason to suppose that Trollope was unhappy with his wife, the well-known fact would remain that he was neither a bounder nor a fool. The genesis of the joke was, I reasonably conjecture, somewhat thus: Mrs. Trollope playfully saying " Ah, Miss Sankey, you are the sort of person Anthony ought to have married," and Trollope shouting "By Jove, yes, if only I
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