A TROLLOPE MEMORY [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] StR,—In
relation to your recent review of Mr. Walpole's Trollope the occasion seems tigiely for recalling the following incident
In 1883, just after the appearance of the Autobiography,
I was spending some weeks in Bruges. Having been from boyhood an ardent- " Trollopian," I was surprised and delighted to make the acquaintance of an old-gentleman there wlio had known the Trollopes well during their melancholy residence in that town. He had lived in Bruges forty or fifty years and 'was an English clergyman, one of the " deceased
wife's sister " exiles not infrequent in those days. '
He had regularly visited the Trollope family both as parson and friend when the father was dying, and when Mrs. Trollope used to sit by his bedside working away at her first books. He took me to the house they had occupied, and pointed out the various rooms, and recalled much about the inmates that
I have unfortunately forgotten. No one then knew anything about all this and my aged friend was, I think, surprised to find any one interested in his recollections, which made them the more realistic to me. A son, too, and, I think, a daughter died in this house, and with the father had been buried, the- old gentleman told me, in the Bruges cemetery some way out of the -town. With the Autobiography fresh-in mind and all England talking about it, I set off without delay for • the cemetery, in -a state of something approaching' excitement - • It was a dark, drizzling, wintry day I remember, and the Targe enclosure was empty of humanity. After some 'time I found my way to the " English or Protestant corner. It was very ill kept, but in due course I discovered by their inscriptions the Trollope graves overrun with tangled grass and briars—father, son and, I think, a third daughter. The upright circular shaft marking one grave was broken off, the headstone of another had sagged out of place. No doubt all this has been long rectified, but at the moment, in contrast to the publicity attaching to Trollope and all concerning him, this dreary neglected corner, representing as it did such a tragic period in the family life that we were all reading, :struck a singularly pathetic 'note.
As a last word I should like heartily to endorse Messrs. 'Sadleir and Walpole's commendation of Trollope's first " still- -born" novel, The Macdermotts of Ballycloran, which practically no one knows. A recent perusal of it has e Affirmed the -impression made in youth that it is one of the saddest tales ever written, and Trollope knew his rural Ireland insider
out. and had good cause to.—I am, Sir, &c., . -
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