Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/608

an Eye, Cousin Henry, Thackeray (1879); The Duke's Children, Cicero (1880); Ayala's Angel, Dr Wortle's School (1881); Frau Frohmann, Lord Palmerston, The Fixed Period, Kept in the Dark, Marion Fay (1882); Mr Scarborough's Family, The Land Leaguers (1883); and An Old Man's Love (1884).

How this enormous total was achieved in spite of official work (of which, lightly as he took it, he did a good deal, and which he did not give up for many years), of hunting three times a week in the season, of whist-playing, of not a little going into general society, he has explained with his usual curious minuteness. He reduced novel-writing to the conditions of regular mechanical work so much so that latterly he turned out so many words in a quarter o an hour, and wrote at this rate so many hours a day. He divided every book beforehand into so many days work and checked off the tallies as he wrote.

A life thus spent could not be very eventful, and its events may be summed up rapidly. In 1858 he went to Egypt also on post-office business, and at the end of 1859 he got himself transferred from Ireland to the eastern district of England. Here he took a house at Waltham. He took an active part in the establishment of The Fortnightly Review in 1865; he was editor of St Paul's for some time after 1867; and at the end of that year he resigned his position in the post-office. He stood for Beverley and was defeated; he received from his old department special missions to America and elsewhere (he had already gone to America in the midst of the Civil War). He went to Australia in 1871, and before going broke up his household at Waltham. When he returned he established himself in London, and lived there till 1880, when he removed to Harting on the confines of Sussex and Hampshire. He had visited South Africa in 1877 and travelled elsewhere. On 3rd November 1882 he was seized with paralysis, and died on 6th December.

Of Trollope's personal character it is not necessary to say much. Strange as his conception of official duty may seem, it was evidently quite honest and sincere, and, though he is said to have been as an official popular neither with superiors nor inferiors, he no doubt did much good work. Privately he was much liked and much disliked,—a great deal of real kindness being accompanied by a blustering and overbearing manner, and an egotism, not perhaps more deep than other men's, but more vociferous. His literary work needs more notice. Nothing of it but the novels is remarkable for merit. His Cæsar and the Cicero are curious examples of a man's undertaking work for which he was not in the least fitted. Thackeray exhibits (though Trollope appears to have both admired Thackeray as an artist and liked him as a man) grave faults of taste and judgment and a complete lack of real criticism. The books of travel are not good, and of a kind not good. Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, published anonymously and as experiments in the romantic style, have been better thought of by the author and by some competent judges than by the public or the publishers. Brown, Jones, and Robinson was still more disliked, and is certainly very bad as a whole, but has touches of curious originality in parts. The rest of the novels have been judged very differently by different persons. There is no doubt that their enormous volume prejudiced readers against them even long before the author let the public into the secret of their manufacture, which has made the prejudice deeper. There is also no doubt that Trollope seldom or never creates a character of the first merit (Mr Crawley in the Last Chronicle of Barset is the one possible exception), and that not one of his books can be called a work of genius. At the same time no one probably has produced anything like such a volume of anything like such merit. He claims for himself that his characters "are always more or less alive, and they are. After his first failures he never produced anything that was not a faithful and sometimes a very amusing transcript of the sayings and doings of possible men and women. His characters are never marionettes, much less sticks. He has some irritating mannerisms, notably a trick of repetition of the same form of words. He is sometimes absolutely vulgar,—that is to say, he does not deal with low life, but shows, though always robust and pure in morality, a certain coarseness of taste. He is constantly rather trivial, and perhaps nowhere out of the Barset series (which, however, is of itself no inconsiderable work) has he produced books that will live. The very faithfulness of his representation of a certain phase of thought, of cultivation, of society, uninformed as it is by any higher spirit, in the long run damaged, as it had first helped, the popularity of his work. But, allowing for all this, it may and must still be said that he held up his mirror steadily to nature, and that the mirror itself was fashioned with no inconsiderable art. (g. sa.)

TROMBONE, a musical instrument of brass. It has a cupped mouthpiece, and is formed of two principal parts—the bell, the bore of which gradually widens, and the slide, which is composed of two cylindrical tubes parallel to each other, upon which two other tubes, communicating at their lower extremities by a pipe curved in a half-circle, glide without loss of air. The mouthpiece is adapted to one of the upper ends of the slide and the bell to the other end. When the slide, which is moved by the right hand, is closed, the instrument is at its highest pitch; the note is lowered in proportion as the column of air is lengthened by drawing out the slide.

Formerly the trombone was known as the sackbut; its modern designation—great trumpet—comes from the Italian. The Germans call it posaune. It is difficult to say where or at what epoch the instrument was invented. In a manuscript of the 9th century, preserved at Boulogne, there is a drawing of an instrument which bears a great resemblance to a trombone deprived of its bell. Virdung^[1] says little about the trombone, but he gives an engraved representation of it, under the name of busaun, which shows that early in the 16th century it was almost the same as that employed in our day. By that time the trombone had come into vogue in England: the band of musicians in the service of Henry VIII. included ten sackbut players, and under Elizabeth, in 1587, there were six. English instrumentalists then enjoyed a certain reputation and were sought for by foreign courts; thus in 1604 Charles  III. of Lorraine sought to recruit his sackbut players from English bands. Prætorius^[2] classes the trombones in a complete family, the relative tonalities of which were thus composed:—1 alt-posaun, 4 gemeine rechte posaunen, 2 quart-posaunen, 1 octav-posaun,—8 in all. The altposaun was in D. With the slide closed it gave the first of the accompanying harmonics:

The gemeine rechte posaunen, or ordinary trombones, were in A. Without using the slide they gave the subjoined sounds:

The quart-posaun was made either in E, the fourth below the gemeine rechte posaun, or in D, the lower fifth. In the latter case it was exactly an octave below the alt- posaun. The octav-posaun was in A. It was constructed in two different fashions: either it had a length double that of the ordinary trombone, or the slide was shortened, the length of the column of air being still maintained by the adaptation of a crook. The first system, which was invented by Hans Schreiber four years before the work of Prætorius appeared, gave the instrumentalist a slide by which he could procure in the lower octave all the sounds of the ordinary trombone. The second system, which Prætorius had known for years, was distinguished from the first, not only by modifications affecting the form, but also by a larger bore. Mersenne^[3] calls the trombone trompette harmonique, but he does not appear to have made himself acquainted with its construction, for we can scarcely find an allusion in the confused text of his work to the tonality of the trombone then in vogue. He established this fact, however, that it was customary in France to lower the instrument a fourth below the pitch of the ordinary trombone by means of a tortil, a kind of crook with a double turn that was fitted between the bell and the slide, "in order," he said, "to make the bass to hautbois concerts."

The compass of the trombone is not limited to the mere harmo-

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1. Musica getutscht und auszgezogen, Basel, 1511.
2. Organographia, Wolfenbüttel, 1619.
3. Harmonie Universelle, Paris, 1627.