SOURCE: "Profession: Man of the World," in A Gathering of Fugitives, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955, pp. 115-25.

In the following essay, written in 1955, Trilling remarks on Milnes ' character and the reactions of his contemporaries and his biographer, James Pope-Hennessy, to it.

I

The addicted reader of Victorian memoirs and biographies knows them to be haunted by a presence which appears sometimes as "Mr. Monckton Milnes (now Lord Houghton)," and sometimes as "Lord Houghton (then Mr. Monckton Milnes)." To our dim sight this ubiquitous being seems to have accomplished only one thing in his lifetime that makes him worthy of recollection—he wrote a biography of Keats before anyone quite knew who Keats was. But we naturally assume that this work has been superseded, that modern scholarship has made it as ghostly as its author, and we rest content with this knowledge of Monckton Milnes: that he spent his...