More satisfactory and important to Trollope than the book’s mere success was the attention it secured from colonial readers, both at home and abroad, more particularly with the South African department of the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Lord Carnarvon was then responsible for the government of Greater Britain. Before his retirement from the Beaconsfield administration on the advance of the British fleet to Constantinople early in 1878, he had read or heard enough of the work to find its views of South African federation of more value to a responsible statesman than the details, bearing on that subject, already brought back to him by Froude from the Cape. This fact soon developed into intimacy what had hitherto been only a casual acquaintance. There then lived, at the age of seventy-six, the third Earl Grey; he had been the singularly able and unsympathetic Colonial Minister in the Russell administration of 1846. Trollope and Lord Carnarvon chanced, one day, to come out together from a room in the Athenæum where Lord Grey was. “His mistake,” said Trollope, referring to Russell’s ex-Colonial Secretary, “always seemed to be his domination by the idea of its being possible to give representative institutions and to stop short of responsible government, after the English fashion under Elizabeth and the Stuarts.” It was a casual remark, but associated itself with an episode in Trollope’s life about which something must be said in the next chapter.
Trollope on the third Earl Grey, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon and the Colonies--Intimacy at Highclere and its literary consequences--Trollope and _Cicero_ 1879--Fraternally criticised by T. A. Trollope and others--Fear of literary fogeydom produces later up-to-date novels beginning with _He Knew He was Right_--A similarity between Trollope and Dickens--Trollope and Delane--The editor’s article and novelist’s book about social and financial scandals of the time--_Mr. Scarborough’s Family_, Trollope’s first novel for a Dickens magazine--Retirement from Montagu Square to North End, Harting--Last Irish novels, _An Eye for an Eye_ (1879), _The Land Leaguers_ (1883), _Dr. Wortle’s School_--General estimate--Last London Residence--Seizure at Sir John Tilley’s--Death in Welbeck Street--Funeral at Kensal Green.