Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/189

 is characteristic. Less painful experience of the life at a public school helped to convince Cowper that human nature was radically corrupt, and Shelley that the existence of a merciful Providence was doubtful, and Thackeray that there was something radically wrong in the social order. Trollope, who hated tyranny as earnestly as any one, seems only to have drawn the modest inference that the discipline at Winchester and Harrow was imperfect; and, for the time, he did not even go so far. He was always, as he says, 'craving for love,' even for the love of the young bullies who made his life a burthen. He was miserable in his school-days, because he 'envied the popularity of popular boys.' They lived in a social paradise from which he was excluded. But he apparently did not think that his exclusion was wrong. It was simply natural—part of the inevitable and providential order of nature. He accepted the code under which he suffered as if it had been the obvious embodiment of right reason. It was quite proper that poverty and clumsiness should be despised and bullied; that was implied in the essential idea of a public school, and his comrades naturally treated him as a herd of wild animals may trample upon an intruder of an inferior species. It 'was their nature