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 obtaining in 1834 a clerkship in the general post-office. His first seven years in the office were, as he admits, equally unprofitable to the service and to himself, and wretched from pecuniary embarrassment. His official superiors on their side treated him harshly, and took no pains to elicit the devotion to duty and the business faculties which he was to show that he possessed in abundant measure. He seemed on the point of dismissal when, in 1841, he extricated himself by applying for an appointment as a post-office surveyor in Ireland, which no one else would accept. From this time all went well with him officially; the open-air life and extensive journeys incidental to his new duties suited him perfectly; while interest in his work and a sense of responsibility developed his business aptitudes. ‘It was altogether a very jolly life which I led in Ireland,’ he says, and he there contracted the taste for hunting which has so greatly enriched his novels with spirited scenes and descriptions. On 11 June 1844 he was married at Rotherham to Rose, daughter of Edward Heseltine, a bank manager at Rotherham. A year before he took to writing as a means of increasing his income, an end which he was long before attaining. His first novel, ‘The Macdermots of Ballycloran,’ begun in 1843, was published in 1847 by T. C. Newby, the general refuge for the destitute in those days, who was about the same time bringing out ‘Wuthering Heights.’ Notwithstanding its considerable merits, ‘The Macdermots’ fell as absolutely dead from the press as did its more remarkable companion. ‘The Kellys and the O'Kellys’ (1848) had the advantage over its predecessor in two respects: it was published by Colburn, and compared by the ‘Times’ reviewer to a leg of mutton—‘substantial, but a little coarse.’ Apparently the taste for lettered mutton was extinct, for Colburn declared that he lost sixty guineas by it, which did not, however, prevent his giving Trollope 20l. for an historical novel, ‘La Vendée’ (1850), unread then and little read since, though it has been reprinted. The two Irish novels afterwards enjoyed a fair measure of popularity.

Disappointed as a novelist, Trollope tried his hand at a comedy, ‘The Noble Jilt,’ which was never even offered to a manager, but which he afterwards utilised in ‘Can you forgive her?’ Further literary experiment was checked by an official commission which for a time prevented all attempt at composition, but proved the chief source of Trollope's subsequent distinction—an inspection of postal deliveries in rural districts throughout the south-west of Great Britain. ‘During two years,’ he says, ‘it was the ambition of my life to cover the country with rural letter-carriers.’ In this way he obtained a large portion of the immense stock of information respecting persons and things which imparts such extraordinary variety to his multitudinous novels. The idea of ‘The Warden’ came to him ‘whilst wandering one midsummer evening round the purlieus of Salisbury Cathedral,’ although the book was not begun for a year afterwards. It was published in 1855, and its success, if not brilliant, was unequivocal. It revealed a new humorist and a new type of humour. No such picture of the special features of cathedral society had been given before, nor has anything so good been done since, excepting the corresponding portions of ‘Barchester Towers’ and the rest of the ‘Barsetshire’ novels. These, however, are much more complex, Trollope having discovered that the same gifts which enabled him to portray clergymen were equally available for other classes of society. For humour, ‘Barchester Towers’ (1857) perhaps stands first; for the suspense of painful interest, ‘Framley Parsonage’ (1861); for general excellence, ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ (1867). They stand at the head of his writings, if we except ‘The Three Clerks’ (1858), a novel at once painfully tragic and irresistibly humorous, in which he drew upon his extensive knowledge of the civil service; and ‘Orley Farm’ (1862), where again pathos and humour contend for the mastery, and the plot is more striking than usual with him. ‘Doctor Thorne’ had appeared in 1858, ‘The Bertrams’ in 1859, and ‘Castle Richmond,’ an Irish novel, in 1860.

During this time Trollope had been rising in official dignity and emolument. Remitted from his English work to Ireland at a considerably higher salary, he had lived successively at Belfast and at Donnybrook. In 1858 he was sent on a postal mission to Egypt, and in the autumn of the same year was despatched on another to the West Indies, which originated his contributions to the literature of travel. It is no wonder that he should have enjoyed such agreeable and lucrative expeditions at the public expense; and Edmund Yates, also a post-office employé, may be well believed when he says that their frequency excited considerable comment. Sir Rowland Hill, however, Trollope's decided adversary in most things, has left it upon record that his mission to the West Indies was fruitful in valuable results, and that his suggestions for the improvement of the packet service had the assent of nautical men. The expedition