Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/319

302 transferred from Ireland to the eastern district of England. Here he took a house, at Waltham. He took an active part in the establishment of the Fortnightly Review in 1865; he was editor of St Paul's for some time after 1867; and at the end of that year he resigned his position in the post office. He stood as a parliamentary candidate for Beverley and was defeated; he received from his old department special missions to America and elsewhere &mdash; he had already gone to America during the Civil War. He went to Australia in 1871, and before going broke up his household at Waltham. When he returned he established himself in London, and lived there until 1880, when he removed to Harting, on the confines of Sussex and Hampshire. He had visited South Africa in 1877 and travelled elsewhere. He died of paralysis on the 6th of December 1882.

Of Trollope's personal character it is not necessary to say much. Strange as his conception of official duty may seem, it was evidently quite honest and sincere, and, though he is said to have been as an official popular neither with superiors nor inferiors, he no doubt did much good work. Privately he was much liked and much disliked &mdash; a great deal of real kindness being accompanied by a blustering and overbearing manner, and an egotism, not perhaps more deep than other men's, but more vociferous. None of his literary work except the novels is remarkable for merit. His Caesar and Cicero are curious examples of a man's undertaking work for which he was not in the least fitted. Thackeray exhibits, though Trollope appears to have both admired Thackeray as an artist and liked him as a man, grave faults of taste and judgment, and a complete lack of real criticism. The books of travel are not good, and of a kind not good. Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel &mdash; stories dealing with Prague and Nuremberg respectively &mdash; were published anonymously and as experiments in the romantic style. They have been better thought of by the author and by some competent judges than by the public or the publishers. The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson was still more disliked, and is certainly very bad as a whole, but has touches of curious originality in parts. Trollope seldom creates a character of the first merit; at the same time his characters are always alive. Dr Thorne, Mr Harding, who has the courage to resign his sinecure in The Warden, Mr Crawley, Archdeacon Grantley, and Mrs Proudie in the same ecclesiastical series, are distinct additions to the personae of English fiction After his first failures he never produced any thing that was not a faithful and sometimes a very amusing transcript of the sayings and doings of possible men and women. His characters are never marionettes, much less sticks. He has some irritating mannerisms, notably a trick of repetition of the same form of words. He is sometimes absolutely vulgar &mdash; that is to say, he does not deal with low life, but shows, though always robust and pure in morality, a certain coarseness of taste. He is constantly rather trivial, and perhaps nowhere out of the Barset series (which, however, is of itself no inconsiderable work) has he produced books that will live. The very faithfulness of his representation of a certain phase of thought, of cultivation, of society, uninformed as it is by any higher spirit, in the long run damaged, as it had first helped, the popularity of his work. But, allowing for all this it may and must still be said that he held up his mirror steadily to nature, and that the mirror itself was fashioned with no inconsiderable art.

TROMBA MARINA, or (Fr. trompette marine; Ger. Marine Trompete, Trompetengeige, Nonnengeige, Tympanischiza or Trummscheit), a triangular bowed instrument about 6 ft. in length, which owes its characteristic timbre to the peculiar construction of the bridge. The tromba marina consists of a body and neck in the shape of a truncated

cone resting on a triangular base. In the days of Michael Praetorius (1618), the length of the Trummscheit was 7 ft. 3 in. and the three sides at the base measured 7 in., tapering to 2 in. at the neck. These measurements varied considerably, as did also the shape of the body and the number of strings. In some cases the base of the body was left open, and in others there were sound-holes. The bridge, from its curiously irregular shape, was known as the &ldquo;shoe&rdquo;; it was thick and high at the one side on which rested the string, and low and narrow at the other which was left loose so that it vibrated against the belly with every movement of the bow, producing a trumpet-like timbre. It is to this feature, in conjunction with its general resemblance in contour to the marine speaking-trumpet of the middle ages, that the name of the instrument is doubtless due.

(K. S.)

TROMBONE (Fr. trombone, Ger. Posaune, Ital. trombono), an important member of the brass wind family of musical instruments formerly known as sackbut. The trombone is characterized by the slide, consisting of two parallel cylindrical tubes, over which two other cylindrical tubes, communicating at their lower extremities by means of a short semicircular

pipe, slip without loss of air. The outer tube, therefore, slides upon the inner, and as it is drawn downwards by the right hand opens a greater length of tube proportional to the depth of pitch required. When the slide is closed the instrument is at its highest pitch. To the upper end of one of the inner tubes is fastened the cup-shaped mouthpiece and to the end of the other tube is fixed the bell-joint. This joint, on the proper proportions of which depend in a greater measure the acoustic properties of the trombone, consists of a length of tubing with conical bore widening out into a large bell and doubled back once upon itself in a plane at right angles to that of the slide. The bell-joint is strengthened by two or three stays, and the slide also has two, one between the inner immovable tubes and the other on the outer sliding tubes, by means of which the slide is drawn out and pushed in.



1. &mdash; Tenor Trombone (Besson &amp; Co.).

Sound is produced on the trombone, as on the horn, by means of the lips stretched like a vibrating reed across the cup mouthpiece from rim to rim; the acoustic principles involved are the same for both instruments. By overblowing, i.e. by the varying tension of the lips and pressure of breath, the harmonic series is obtained, which is effective between the second and the tenth harmonics, the fundamental being but rarely of practical use.

There are seven positions of the slide on the trombone, each