Now there is hardly a word of this in which Anthony is not more or less mistaken; and that simply because he had not adequate opportunities for close observation.  The affection which subsisted between my mother and my brother Anthony was from the beginning to the end of their lives as tender and as warm as ever existed between a mother and son.  Indeed I remember that in the old days of our youth we used to consider Anthony the Benjamin.  But from the time that he became a clerk in the Post Office to her death, he and my mother were never together but as visitors during the limited period of a visit.  From the time that I resigned my position at Birmingham to the time of her death, I was uninterruptedly an inmate of her house, or she of mine.  And I think that I knew her, as few sons know their mothers.

No regicide, would-be or other, ever darkened her doors.  No French proletaire, or other French political refugee was ever among her guests.  She never was acquainted with any Italian marquis who had escaped in any degree of distress from poverty.  With General Pepe she was intimate for years.  But of him the world knows enough to perceive that my brother cannot have alluded to him.  And I recollect no other marquis.  It is very true that in the old Keppel Street and Harrow days several Italian exiles, and I think some Spaniards, used to be her occasional guests.  This had come to pass by means of her intimacy with Lady Dyer, the wife and subsequently widow of Sir Thomas Dyer, whose years of foreign service had interested him and her in many such persons.  The friends of her friend were her friends.  They were not such by virtue of their political position and ideas.  Though it is no doubt true, that caring little about politics, and in a jesting way (how jesting many a memorial of fun between her and Lady Dyer, and Miss Gabell, the daughter of Dr. Gabell of Winchester, is still extant in my hands to prove;) the general tone of the house was “Liberal.”  But nothing can be farther from the truth than the idea that my mother was led to become a Tory by the “graciousness” of any “marquises” or great folks of any kind.  I am inclined to think that there was one great personage, whose (not graciousness, but) intellectual influence did impel her mind in a Conservative direction.  And this was Metternich.  She had more talk with him than her book on Vienna would lead a reader to suppose; and very far more of his mind and influence reached her through the medium of the Princess.

To how great a degree this is likely to have been the case may be in some measure perceived from a letter which the Princess addressed to my mother shortly after she had left Vienna.  She preserved it among a few others, which she specially valued, and I transcribe it from the original now before me.

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“Vous ne pourriez croire, chere Madame Trollope, combien le portrait que vous avez charge le Baron Huegel de me remettre m’a fait de plaisir!