To this body in its earlier days, as reconstituted by Peel, belonged the evil genius of Trollope’s first novel, Myles Ussher. Captain Ussher was his local title; for the revenue police were at that time organised as a military force. He had of course received his appointment without submission to any educational test. The natural son of a wealthy landed proprietor in Ulster, he owed his appointment entirely to family influence. He could read, write, knew something of figures, and had once learned, but had long since entirely forgotten, some Latin grammar.
There are touches in the description of this man showing that the novelist had profited by the _Ethics_, which, to quote Trollope’s words to the writer, “at least helped me here, though they had not done so in the Oxford scholarship examination for which I read them.” For Ussher’s valour was the spurious courage that comes of ignorance, and arises in equal parts from animal spirits and from not having yet experienced the evil effects of danger rather than from real capabilities of enduring its consequences. In other words, we are told, never having been hit in a duel, he would have no hesitation in fighting one; never having had a bad fall on horseback, he was a bold rider; never having had his head broken in a row, he would readily go into one. To pain, if it were not absolutely disabling, he was indifferent, because, not having yet suffered its acute form, he lacked the imagination to make him realise the possibility of sometimes experiencing it to such a degree. This kind of courage is shrewdly declared by Trollope to be that by far the most generally met with, as well as fully sufficient for the life Captain Ussher had to lead. The quality that chiefly gave Ussher some vogue with the better classes of his district, was his unfailing self-confidence and unconcealed belief in his ability, whether in war or love, to carry through any purpose he had taken up. His keen, calculating Irish brain had taught him the universal readiness to accept men at their own valuation of themselves. Acting on that principle, he had created for himself an impression, strong everywhere but especially among women, of being irresistible in whatever he might take up, and of having received from fate itself a guarantee against failure, whether in things of business or of the heart. Add to all this that, in a country where a little money goes a long way, Ussher contrived to be always supplied with ready cash.