No two nineteenth century men of letters were personally more unlike each other than James Anthony Froude and Anthony Trollope. “Old Trollope, after banging about the world so long, now treading in my footsteps, and, like an intellectual bluebottle, buzzing about at Cape Town” was the historian’s characteristic comment, made in his softest and silkiest tones on the novelist’s voyage to the country, visited by himself some seven years earlier. Trollope secured his object by getting out his South African book some two years before Froude, in 1880, had published a line on the subject. In the Kimberley district, Trollope, we have already seen, had discovered the historic “Dr. Jim.” He next made the acquaintance and sounded the praises of the clever young lady Miss Olive Schreiner, author of _The Story of an African Farm_, published on Trollope’s instance by Chapman and Hall.
In 1878, however, no really popular work about the southern parts of the dark continent had appeared before Trollope’s volumes. These drew the Cape provinces, Natal, The Transvaal, and the diamond fields in The Orange River Free State exactly as at the time they were, and liberally relieved their purely historical or descriptive contents with touches often as instructive as they were humorous, revealing scenery and character by the flashlight of a representative anecdote or well-turned phrase. The Transvaal annexation, accomplished before his visit, is called, in a rather Carlylean phrase, one of the “highest-handed acts in history”: “It was,” said Trollope, “a typical instance of the beneficent injustice of the British.” For the rest, diamond-fields and goldmines alike struck him as a “meretricious means of attracting population to the country.” The Boer farmers are very fine fellows of their kind, most unhandsomely treated by all English writers except himself. As for the proposed withdrawal from The Transvaal, it is an idea only worthy of a pusillanimous dunderhead. The reception given to the South African book by the critics and public markedly indicated a recovery of the popularity which a year or two earlier had seemed for the moment on the wane. _The Times_ declared it had not a page uninstructive or dull. _The Athenæum_ found that, coming in the nick of time, it admirably supplied a public want. “Full of freshness and individuality in all its presentations, social and political,” said _The Academy_. “Always judicious, often very entertaining, and only from sometimes excessive zeal a trifle diffuse,” chimed in _The Spectator_.