Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/347

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MRS. TROLLOPE. 339 on each side by one of nearly equal size and splendor ; the roofs of all three were covered by a crowd of men ; cannon saluted them from the shore as they passed by to the distance of a quarter of a mile above the town. There they turned about and came down the river with a rapid but stately motion, the three vessels so close together as to appear one mighty mass upon the water." Mrs. Trollope was so happy as to catch a view of the Hero of New Orleans as he walked bareheaded between a silent lane of people • on his way from the steamboat to the hotel, where he was to hold a reception. " He wore his gray hair carelessly," she remarks, " but not ungracefully arranged, and, spite of his harsh, gaunt features, he looks like a gentleman and a soldier." Her husband and her son conversed much with the general on board the steamboat. " They were pleased," she says, " by his conversation and manners, but deeply disgusted by the brutal familiar- ity to which they saw him exposed at every place on their progress at which they stopped." Mrs. Trollope and her children returned to England in 1830, carrying with her, as she tejls us, six hundred pages of manuscript notes similar to the specimens I have given. They were speedily published, ran through three editions in three months, were republished in New York, and called forth an amount of comment of all kinds, from eulogistic to vituperative, which has rarely been paral- leled. The work set her up in the business of an author- ess. She followed it by a very long list of works of travel and fiction, most of which were tolerably suc- cessful. Both her sons became voluminous writers, and some of her grandchildren 1 believe, have written books. Her husband, too, is the author of legal works and a History of the Church. If all the works produced by this family