The Last Chronicle of Barset (134 page)

4.
Make her flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone
: Genesis 2:23: ‘And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.' These lines are adapted in the Solemnization of Matrimony in
The Book of Common Prayer
.

1.
a ‘mere clerk'
: In Chapter
6
of
The Small House at Allington
.

2.
Mr Smith's adhesion
: See Chapters 18, 20 and 23 of
Framley Parsonage
.

1.
Rotten Row
: Road in Hyde Park, running along the Serpentine from Apsley House to Kensington Gardens, where it was fashionable to promenade, particularly on horseback or in a carriage.

2.
Achilles and Apsley House
: Apsley House, designed by Robert Adam, was bought by the first Duke of Wellington as his London residence. After his death in 1852 it became a museum and art gallery. The Duke, the famous hero of many battles, including Waterloo, was honoured in his lifetime by an enormous nude statue thought to represent Achilles, erected in 1822 in Hyde Park and facing towards Apsley House. It was paid for by a subscription by the Ladies of England Society. See also Introduction, pp. xxiii–xxvi.

3.
for the renewal of love
: Adaptation of the early-sixteenth-century proverb ‘The quarrel of lovers is the renewal of love', originally from Terence's (
c
. 190–159 BC)
Andria
I, 555.

1.
into the house
: See
Framley Parsonage
, Chapter
46
.

2.
tiled
: In Freemasonry, a meeting or lodge is tiled if it is protected from the entrance of the uninitiated and kept secret by a tiler or guard at the door.

3.
Ruat cœlum, fiat justitia
: (Latin) Though the heavens fall, let justice be done, resembling the motto of the Emperor Ferdinand I (1503–64),
Fiat justitia et pereat mundus
(Let justice be done though the world perish). It occurs again in Chapter
61
. In contrast, another Latin phrase is used a few lines later,
Rem, si possis recte, si non, quocunque modo
(Do a thing, if possible honestly, if not, by whatever means), as given in Horace (65–8 BC),
Epistles
, I, i, 66.

4.
buncombe
: Nonsense, humbug; American slang which became popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. Attributed to Felix Walker, a congressman from North Carolina who apologized to the House for a long and pointless speech by saying he had to make it ‘for Buncombe', one of the counties of his constituency.

1.
a place where three roads met
: The location evokes the place where Oedipus killed his father in
Oedipus Rex
by Sophocles (496–406 BC).

1.
beeves
: Cattle or oxen, archaic plural of beef.

2.
Honour thy father – that thy days may be long in the land
: Exodus 20:12 and
The Book of Common Prayer
: Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

1.
yeoman's service
: Useful, powerful service or aid; the phrase dates from at least 1500, and probably refers to the high opinion of the yeoman in the English armies.

2.
the Academy's great exhibition
: The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of works by living artists still takes place annually. In the nineteenth century the private view and dinner which marked its opening in early May was the social event which inaugurated the London ‘Season'.

3.
a certain nobleman
: Almost certainly the second Duke of Wellington, who opened the art collections and some of the private apartments of Apsley House to the public in 1853, a year after the first Duke's death. (Today it houses the Wellington Museum, and is still home to the Dukes.) See also Chapter
53
, note
2
, and Introduction, p. xxiv.

4.
in April as at any other time
: Mr Pratt does not feel obliged to leave a pasteboard visiting card on a morning call until after the ‘middle of May', when the London social Season has properly begun.

5.
an old Paladin
: Paragon of knighthood; faithful and loyal knight-errant. Originally, the companions of Roland and Oliver in the early-twelfth-century
Chanson de Roland
. In later versions, the twelve peers who always surrounded Charlemagne.

1.
Haidee in Lambro's island
: Haidee, the daughter of the pirate Lambro, saves Don Juan when he is cast up on a Greek island, and the two fall in love. See Canto the Second of Byron's
Don Juan
(1819–24).

2.
like a guy… Mad Bess of Bedlam
: From the 1830s a guy was a person dressed poorly or outlandishly, after the grotesquely dressed effigy of Guy Fawkes, leader of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which is traditionally burned on Guy Fawkes night (5 November). Mad Bess of Bedlam was a name for an itinerant beggar, especially one who affected madness. ‘Bedlam' is a corruption of Bethlehem, from the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem in Bishopsgate, London, which had been a hospital for lunatics since about 1400. The term gained currency after the dissolution of the monasteries when the number of beggars roaming the country increased – the poor could no longer rely on relief from the religious orders.

1.
the asses' bridge… ‘Lycidas'
: The
pons asinorum
which is the fifth proposition in the first book of Euclid's (
c
. 300 BC)
Elements
of geometry. The difficulty of this proposition made it for some an uncrossable bridge, a barrier to further progress. ‘Lycidas' is an elegy (1637) by Milton.

2.
a blind giant
: Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops who is blinded by Odysseus in Book 9 of Homer's
Odyssey
.

3.
at the mill with slaves
: From Milton's
Samson Agonistes
(1671), 11. 40–41.

4.
Belisarius
: Acclaimed general under the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century who, when accused of a conspiracy against the Emperor, was supposedly blinded and impoverished.

5
.
the romantic tale of the woman Pope
: The legend of the female pope was widely believed until the seventeenth century, and even in the late nineteenth
century it was still employed to attack the papacy and the Roman church. Dated variously from 915 to
c
. 1100, the best-known stories are that the young Joan went from Mainz to Athens dressed as a man, became an exemplary student and then settled in Rome to become a distinguished and renowned lecturer who was then elected pope. Her imposture was discovered when she gave birth. A popular nineteenth-century card game was named after her (see Chapter
16
, note
1
).

6.
Nil conscire sibi, nullâ pallescere culpâ
: (Latin) To be conscious of no guilt, to turn pale at no charge, from Horace's
Epistles
I, i, 61. Repeated in Chapter
63
.

7.
gall and wormwood
: Lamentations 3:19: ‘Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall.'

1.
to the third and fourth generation
: Exodus 20:5 (from the second of the Ten Commandments): ‘… for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.'

1.
Requiescat in pace
: (Latin) May she rest in peace.

2.
one very memorable occasion
: In
Barchester Towers
the scheming Rev. Slope is briefly successful in convincing the bishop that he should stand up to his wife.

1.
would have scandalised him
: According to Bishop Proudie's evangelical principles, praying for the departed soul of Mrs Proudie would have come
dangerously close to Roman Catholic or Tractarian practices. He would have believed that her faith alone could save her, and that the intercession of prayers after her death was pointless.

2.
the name of the Lord
: Bishop Proudie adapts Job 1:21: ‘… Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.'

3.
your proverb of De mortuis
: De mortuis nil nisi bonum ([Speak] nothing but good of the dead), a sixth-century BC Latin proverb.

1.
deaf as adders to courtesy
: Psalms 58:4–5: ‘Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.'

2.
his own withers to be unwrung
:
Hamlet
III.ii.237: ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.' To ‘wring someone's withers' is to cause hurt or distress by a snub (withers is the ridge between the shoulder blades of a horse).

1.
excelsior
: (Latin) Literally ‘higher'. The term became popular in this period after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem ‘Excelsior' appeared in 1841.

2.
plucking glory from the nettle danger
: Adaptation of Hotspur's lines from Shakespeare's
Henry IV, Part One
: ‘out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety' (II.iii.9–10).

3.
Venetia's thraldom
: Austria ruled Venice from 1815 to 1866. At the time that Trollope was writing
The Last Chronicle
Venice became part of the new Kingdom of Italy.

4.
boxed a clerg yman's ears
: See
Barchester Towers
, Chapter
40
.

1.
very stoutly anti-sabbatarial
: Unlike Mrs Proudie, who was a firm Sabbatarian and strictly observed the Fourth Commandment which sets apart the Sabbath as a day of rest. The observance of Sunday became an important social and political issue in the Victorian period, and Sabbatarianism was identified with the evangelical movement.

1.
got the right sow by the ear
: Got hold of the right person or thing; arrived at the correct conclusion (proverbial).

2.
feet are beautiful upon the mountains
: Isaiah 52:7: ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace…'

1.
the real Simon Pure
: Catchphrase originating from Susannah Centlivre's popular comedy
A Bold Stroke for a Wife
(1718), in which a colonel impersonates Simon Pure, a Quaker preacher, to impress his lover's guardian. Upon his gaining consent to marry, the real Simon Pure arrives.

2.
quorum pars magna fui
: (Latin) of which I was a large part, from Virgil's (70–19 BC)
Aeneid
II, 5–6.

1.
as to the keeping of time
: See
As You Like It
III.ii.293–8, and IV.i.36–50.

1.
the bishop's preaching against your father's chanting
: Actually it was the bishop's evangelical chaplain Mr Slope who preached a sermon denouncing ‘the practice of intoning in parish churches' after Mr Harding had led a sung litany in the cathedral (see Chapter
6
of
Barchester Towers
).

2.
other chronicles
: See Chapter
52
of
Barchester Towers
.

3.
thyself and thy past life
:
Barchester Towers
opens with the death of the Archdeacon's father, Bishop Grantly, just as the government is in the process of changing, thereby placing in the balance the Archdeacon's appointment as the next bishop. He is forced to confront the question of whether he wishes his beloved father to die more expediently to preserve his chances of the bishopric.

4.
no return for any traveller
: Lines spoken by Hamlet in III.i.79–80; that which comes ‘after death' is ‘The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns'.

1.
The sources of the Nile, of which men now talk so much
: In the 1850s and 1860s there were a number of expeditions by Britons into the African continent, many competing to discover the sources of the Nile. Most famously, the missionary doctor and explorer David Livingstone set out from London in August 1865 on his final expedition. At the time of composition of
The Last Chronicle
, there were rumours in the English press that he had been killed by Zulus. (He was found by the journalist Henry Stanley at Ujiji in 1871.)