The second Lord Lytton, then attached to our Lisbon embassy, Julian Fane, and the eighth Viscount Strangford represented various branches of _belles lettres_, as well as of diplomacy and cosmopolitanism, in the company among which Trollope now found himself. Not the elder alone, but both the two brothers who were successively the seventh and eighth Lords Strangford are reflected, even to their personal appearance, in the Waldershare of Disraeli’s _Endymion_--fair with short, curly, brown hair and blue eyes, not exactly handsome, but with a countenance full of expression, and the index of quick emotions, whether of joy or sorrow. George Smythe, the seventh of the Strangford Viscounts, the reputed original of Coningsby, was no longer alive at the time of these _Pall Mall_ dinners. His brother and successor, Percy, figured among Greenwood’s most important contributors from the first. None of the group now mentioned had the same vivid interest for Trollope as Strangford; but the most distinguished of the others, notably Fitzjames Stephen, William Rathbone Greg, George Henry Lewes, and James Hannay, exercised upon him something of the same educational influence that they did upon Greenwood himself. Many years subsequently to this, Trollope met as a guest at the Cosmopolitan Club the ex-officer of the French Navy, L. M. J. Viaud, who, as Pierre Loti, became famous in 1880. “I could not,” was Trollope’s comment, “amid the many personal dissimilarities of the two, but be struck by a certain resemblance between James Hannay’s breezy picturesqueness in stating his views of history or politics, and the touches, as graphic as they were delicate, that made Viaud’s descriptions, whether in conversation or writing, living things.”
The period now reached was to present Trollope with another new connection in periodical literature, not less noticeable in itself, and more far-reaching in some of its consequences than any of those already mentioned. His first dealings with the publishers Chapman and Hall, while still settled at 193 Piccadilly, were, as has been already said, over _Dr. Thorne_ in 1858. Pre-eminent among the nineteenth century writers as the novelist of English home-life, Trollope possessed, and on occasion showed, as much of international sympathy as Bulwer-Lytton himself, and, by original observation as well as by English and foreign reading, took real pains to keep himself in touch with the higher European thought of his time. Occasionally he took his summer holiday at a pretty little hamlet in the Black Forest, Höllenthal, near Freiburg. Here he sometimes received visits from well-placed continental friends who, in a few hours’ talk, took him effectively behind the scenes of European society letters, politics, or finance. From Höllenthal, too, were made those excursions that not only acquainted him with the most-desired hospitalities of Cologne, Frankfort, and Berlin, but that also brought him into the heart of the Fatherland’s inner life as seen, now in obscure towns or obscurer villages, now in the studies and lecture-rooms of thinkers and writers. Such were the experiences that suggested to Trollope’s active mind the possibility of founding a magazine which should be for England what the _Revue des deux Mondes_ was for France; that periodical, as was happily said by Lord Morley of Blackburn, had “brought down abstract discussion from the library to the man in the street.” Why should not, Trollope asked himself, the like of this be done here. The same idea had occurred almost simultaneously to others of light and learning in contemporary literature. Huxley, E. A. Freeman, Sir R. F. Burton, E. S. Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison, and the present poet laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, promised the enterprise their “vote and interest”; Lord Houghton, without whose counsel and goodwill no undertaking of the sort could then have been carried out, forwarded it not only with his blessing but his purse.