XXVI. MRS. TROLLOPE. CINCINNATI, fifty-five years ago, was a city of twenty thousand inhabitants. As the center of the grow- ing business of the Ohio valley, it enjoyed a European celebrity which drew to it many emigrants, and some visitors of capital and education. The Trollope family, since so famous in literature, were living there at that time in a cottage just under the bluff which overhangs the town. Fresh from England, and retaining all their English love of nature and out-of-door exercise, the whole family, parents, two sons and two daughters, often climbed that lofty and umbrageous height, since pierced by an elevator, and now crowned by one of the most beautiful streets in the world. Mrs. Trollope, her two daughters, and her second son, Henry, then a lad of twelve, had reached Cincinnati by the Mississippi River, and were joined there afterwards by her eldest son and her husband, who was a London lawyer of some distinction. In her work upon the " Domestic Manners of the Americans," the lady does not mention the motive of this visit to America. We have the liberty of guessing it. She was an ardent friend of Miss Frances Wright, an English lady of fortune and benevolence, who came to this country with the Trollopes in 1827, with the view of founding a Communal Home according to the ideas of Owen and Fourier. Miss Wright afterwards lectured in New York and elsewhere, but her ideas were deemed erroneous and romantic, and she had (332)
