I was, I think, about eight years old when my parents removed from Keppel Street to Harrow-on-the-Hill. My father’s practice, I take it, was becoming less and less satisfactory, and his health equally so. And the move to Harrow was intended as a remedy or palliation for both these evils. My father was a very especially industrious and laborious man. And I have the authority of more than one very competent judge among his professional contemporaries for believing that he was as learned a Chancery lawyer as was to be found among them. How then was his want of success to be accounted for? One of the competent authorities above alluded to accounted for it thus: “Your father,” he said to me many years afterwards, when his troubles and failures had at last ceased to afflict him, “never came into contact with a blockhead without insisting on irrefutably demonstrating to him that he was such. And the blockhead did not like it! He was a disputatious man; and he was almost in variably—at least on a point of law—right. But the world differed from{58} him in the opinion that being so gave him the right of rolling his antagonist in the dust and executing an intellectual dance of triumph on his prostrate form.” He was very fond of whist, and was I believe a good player. But people did not like to play with him. “Many men,” said an old friend once, “will scold their partners occasionally. But Trollope invariably scolds us all round with the utmost impartiality; and that every deal!”