The Last Chronicle of Barset (133 page)

1.
chevalier sans peur and sans reproche
: A knight without fear or blame; a description in contemporary chronicles of the French knight Pierre Bayard (
c
. 1476–1524), anon.

2.
nor his ox, nor his ass
: From the Tenth Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's' (Exodus 20:17).

1.
or for giving in marriage
: Grace is perhaps conflating passages from Matthew 22:30 (‘For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven'), and Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 (‘To every thing there is a season… a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing…'). See also Matthew 24:38.

1.
skedaddled
: Run away. The term, derived from American military slang early in the century, would have been fairly new in Britain when Trollope published
The Last Chronicle
. Lily Dale's use of slang gives her character a faint premonition of the ‘New Woman' who would become an important cultural phenomenon not long after.

1.
In formâ pauperis
: (Latin) In the form, or character, of a pauper.

2.
the Quirk, Gammon and Snaps… the Dodson and Foggs
: Quirk, Gammon and Snap were a firm of crooked lawyers in Samuel Warren's tremendously popular novel,
Ten Thousand a Year
(1840–41). Dodson and Fogg were the firm representing Mrs Bardell in her breach of promise case against Mr Pickwick in Charles Dickens's
Pickwick Papers
(1837).

3.
the text about the quiver
: Psalms 127:4–5: ‘As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.' The Toogoods' quiver is referred to again in Chapter
40
.

4.
the gods provide you
: Adapted from John Dryden's ‘Alexander's Feast; or the Power of Music. An Ode in Honour of St Cecilia's Day' (1697), 11.105–6.

5.
You can't get into the box to do it
: Until the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898 the accused could not appear in the witness box to give evidence.

1.
Grizel
: Grizel, or the ‘Patient Griselda', was the medieval model of female fortitude and submissiveness, subjected to several humiliations as a test of her patience by her wealthy husband. See, for example, Boccaccio's
Decameron
(1349–51) or Chaucer's ‘The Clerk's Tale' (
c
. 1387).

2.
the sun shall go down upon your wrath
: Ephesians 4:26: ‘Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.'

1.
It's all the same thing
: The Church Discipline Act (1840) set up procedures by which those in holy orders could be disciplined. A bishop could appoint a Commission of Inquiry to establish whether there was a case to bring
against an accused clergyman; if so, it could be tried at the Consistorial Court. The Court of Arches was the Consistorial Court for the see of Canterbury, named after the arches supporting the church steeple of St Mary-le-Bow, where the court was formerly held.

1.
in her brother's grounds
: See Chapter
54
of
The Small House at Allington
.

2.
all my heart and all my strength and all my soul
: Luke 10:27: ‘… Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.' See also Mark 2:30.

3.
a stricken deer
: The wounded or hunted deer was a familiar image of the lover from Classical times, as in the myth of Diana and Actaeon, and in Virgil's description of Dido's love for Aeneas.

1.
the court
: Capel Court, the Stock Exchange.

1.
Honi soit qui mal y pense
: (French) Shame be to him who evil thinks of this; the motto of the Order of the Garter. Mrs Dobbs Broughton is thinking of the apocryphal story that Edward III (the founder of the order) used the phrase when retrieving a lady's lost garter.

2.
That way madness lies
:
King Lear
III.iv.21.

3.
May meetings
: An important annual event in the evangelical church year, when believers from all over the country gathered at Exeter Hall on the Strand for prayer and debate. (The evangelical movement insisted on personal conversion, salvation through belief in Christ's death and resurrection,
and in the authority of the Scriptures.) Like Mrs Broughton, Trollope had ‘no aptitude' for these meetings; one of his assignments for the
Pall Mall Gazette
was to attend a season of the May assemblies, but he only attended one, finding it an ‘agony' and a ‘martyrdom' (see
An Autobiography
, Chapter
11
). His fiction is well-known for its negative depiction of evangelicals.

4.
no Imogen of a wife
: Heroine of Shakespeare's
Cymbeline
; like Griselda, a sorely tried wife and model of virtue and patience.

1.
Sir Charles Grandison
: Eponymous hero of Samuel Richardson's novel (1754), a paragon of gentlemanly virtue, honour and gallantry.

1.
à la Russe
: (French) Dining ‘in the Russian style', which had recently come into vogue, involved a large number of servants handing the dishes to each diner individually; previously the various dishes were always placed on the table for each guest to help him-or herself, and the host carved the meat. Trollope considered
à la Russe
dining affected and inconvenient (see Victoria Glendinning,
Trollope
(London, 1992), p. 271).

2.
Who thundering comes… promised best
: Lines 180–81 of Byron's
The Giaour
(1813), and his
The Corsair
(1814), Canto the First, XIV, 422–3. Conrad, the irresistible hero of the latter, is a pirate chief, and Medora is his lover. Trollope's mother was a devotee of Byron, and Trollope sometimes mocks the sensational popularity of the poet, especially among women readers. See, for example, Lizzie Eustace in
The Eustace Diamonds
(1873) who daydreams that she is the Corsair's lover.

3.
Gladstone claret
: Name given to cheap French claret, readily available after Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, reduced the Customs duty on it in 1860.

1.
the man on the pillar
: Saint Simeon Stylites of Syria (
c
. 390–459), the most renowned of the saints who mortified the flesh, stood on a pillar for thirty years; he was known in England mainly through Edward Gibbon's derisive account of him in
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776–88) and Tennyson's poem ‘Saint Simeon Stylites' (1842).

2.
the Newdigate
: The Newdigate Prize for English Verse, established in 1805 by Sir Roger Newdigate, is a poetry prize awarded annually to an Oxford undergraduate.

1.
No one of a sudden becomes most base
: From Juvenal's (early second century)
Satires
II, 83.

1.
the needy knife-grinder
: In the poem ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder' (1797) by George Canning, a well-to-do radical tries to get a knife-grinder to rail against supposedly cruel, aristocratic oppressors. When the knife-grinder confesses that he is perfectly happy with his lot, and would like only sixpence for a drink, the ‘friend of humanity' is incensed by his lack of revolutionary spirit, and (in the last lines) ‘Kicks the Knife-grinder, overturns his Wheel, and exit[s] in a transport of republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy'.

1.
what care I how fair she be
: Adaptation of a well-known song by George Wither (1588–1667). The song (1619) usually goes by the title of its first line, ‘Shall I, wasting in despair', and its publication in Thomas Percy's
Reliques
(1765) ensured its popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John Eames is thinking of the first stanza:

Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a Woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care,
'Cause another's Rosy are?
Be she fairer than the Day,
Or the flowery Meads in May;
   If she be not so to me,
   What care I how fair she be.

He misquotes the song again later, in Chapter
77
.

2.
preux chevalier
: (French) Gallant or valiant knight.

3.
levanted… breach of promise case
: Absconded, probably leaving debts unpaid or as in this case, eluding legal process. A number of nineteenth-century novelists, including Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, used the breaking of an engagement and the subsequent court case within the plots of their novels, probably in response to the frequency of these cases in the Victorian period, and the public fascination with them as they were reported in the newspapers of the day. Scandalous or sensational trial transcripts, often including the lovers' letters, appeared in the press.

1.
the American war
: Trollope followed the events of the US Civil War (1861–5) closely, as did many of his countrymen and women. In 1861, researching his book
North America
, he spent some time with the Northern troops ‘in Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri… along the line of attack' (see
An Autobiography
, Chapter
9
).

2.
thoughtful of the morrow
: Matthew 6:34: ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.'

1.
appeal to the two portraits
: Hamlet's presentation to his mother of the contrast between the portraits of his father and uncle, beginning: ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this…' (III.iv.53).

2.
poste restante
: (French) A department of the post office where letters are kept to await collection by the addressee.

3.
wide-awake
: Low, wide-brimmed, soft felt hat.

1.
Lady-day
: 25 March; in the church calendar, the day of the annunciation of the Virgin. Traditionally, the date for termination of agricultural contracts, such as land or house leases, or terms of agricultural hire.

2.
former chronicles of the city
: The tale of Mr Harding's wardenship of the Hiram's Hospital almshouses is told in the first novel in the series,
The Warden
(1855), and in
Barchester Towers
.

3.
the lean and slippered pantaloon
: The sixth of the ‘seven ages' of man, according to Jaques in Shakespeare's
As You Like It
II.vii.158.

4.
Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace
: Luke 2:29. The same words are used in the
Nunc Dimittis
, from the Order for Evening Prayer in
The Book of Common Prayer
.

1.
great occasion then to respect him
: See Chapter
15
of
Framley Parsonage
.

1.
asked to return only whisper for whisper
: In Genesis 39 Potiphar's wife tried to lure an unwilling Joseph, her husband's steward, to her bed. When he refused to comply she accused him of attempted rape and had him imprisoned.

2.
His hair was grey, but not with years
: Again Trollope puts Byron into the mouth of a woman of rather misguided romantic sensibility (see Chapter
40
, note
2
). The lines are adapted from the opening of
The Prisoner of Chillon
(1816): My hair is grey, but not with years, Nor grew it white In a single night, As men's have grown from sudden fears.

3.
save her
: In Genesis 22 God tested Abraham's faith by demanding that he give his only son Isaac as a burnt offering, but just as Abraham took the knife to sacrifice his son God provided ‘a ram caught in a thicket by his horns' (22:13) to be sacrificed in Isaac's stead.