- tion" led him into alluring speculations that invariably
proved disastrous to the members of his family. Not financial but missionary and philanthropic zeal animate the souls immortalized by Dickens,—Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, Reverend Honeythunder, and the Snagsbys. Brontë and Kingsley specialize in the religious bigot. The former satirizes the Jesuit in Villette, but not St. John Rivers, who is drawn seriously. The latter gives a vivid picture in his Mrs. Locke and the Calvinistic preachers, and another, of the opposite type, done with more partisanship and less sympathy, in the vicar and Argemone in Yeast. Trollope is more interested in the sociological zealot. He introduces him as the author, Mr. Popular Sentiment; the "Barchester Brutus," Mr. John Bold; the demagogue, Ontario Moggs, son of a capitalist, and advocate of labor unions; and some characters in the Parliamentary Series. A sample from a harangue of Moggs will serve to illustrate the fair-mindedness that accompanies Trollope's love of parody. He quotes and then comments:[1]
"'Gentlemen, were it not for strikes, this would be a country
in which no free man could live. By the aid of strikes we will
make it the Paradise of the labourer, and Elysium of industry,
an Eden of artisans.' There was much more of it, but the
reader might be fatigued were the full flood of Mr. Moggs's
oratory to be let loose upon him. And through it all there was
a germ of truth, and a strong dash of true, noble feeling; but
the speaker had omitted as yet to learn how much thought
must be given to a germ of truth before it can be made to pro-*
- ↑ Ralph the Heir, 81. He dissects him a little further,—"How far the real philanthropy of the man may have been marred by an uneasy and fatuous ambition; how far he was carried away by a feeling that it was better to make speeches at the Cheshire Cheese than to apply for payment of money due to his father, it would be very hard for us to decide."
