Trollope on Froude's "Caesar"

Abstract

NTHONY TROLLOPE'S LIFE was so full of a number of things that even his most recent critics deny on the score of time that he could have been widely read.' The catalogue of his rich library, though it indicates the number of books on his shelves, does not, of course, guarantee that he had read them all. But the volumes with extensive marginalia which occasionally appear on the market or turn up in libraries offer some perspective for generalization. The first number of The Trollopian carried a notice of Trollope's annotated drama collection, and Michael Sadleir's article transcribing the Bacon jottings is another bit of evidence certifying Trollope's habits of critical commentary. Another such volume that has recently come to my attention is his copy of James Anthony Froude's Caesar.2 What he has to say about this book has special interest in view of his own volumes on Caesar and Cicero, both of which had been completed (though the Cicero was not yet published) when Froude's work appeared in I 879. The pungency of Trollope's remarks on Froude as a historian is understandable on at least two counts. First, Trollope was widely read in Roman history and literature, and he had strong objections to Froude's reading of character. In his autobiography he tells us that after I 869 he spent at least an hour daily with his favorite Latin authors. This regimen was undertaken nominally for recreation, but perhaps another and deeper motivation was also operative. There can be no doubt, I think, that on the score of his education Trollope suffered from an inferiority