The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

“Why don't you pay an old woman sixpence a week to fret for you?” he said to a postmaster who came to him with grievances. The postmaster left his presence with an additional grievance that Mr. Trollope was a brute. Sir Rowland Hill might have agreed with this postmaster, for he could never get on with Trollope. We can scarcely be surprised. In his Autobiography, Trollope says of Sir Rowland that “it was a pleasure to me to differ from Sir Rowland Hill on all occasions, and looking back now, I think that in all such differences I was right.” Such a confession explains much of Trollope's unpopularity. There is no place where omniscience is less appreciated than in a Government office. Mr. O'Connor Morris, who was the Postmaster-General of Jamaica when Trollope visited the island in 1858, has left on record this judgment on the novelist's official conduct to him. “I believe Mr. Trollope had a thousand good qualities of head and heart, which were disguised in a most unfortunate and repelling manner.” Edmund Yates also worked at St. Martin's le Grand, and he has described very graphically the kind of scene which usually took place when Trollope was interviewing Sir Rowland Hill. “Trollope would bluster and rave and roar, blowing and spluttering like a grampus, while the pale old gentleman opposite him, sitting back in his arm-chair and regarding his antagonist furtively under his spectacles, would remain perfectly quiet until he saw his chance, and then deliver himself of the most unpleasant speech he could frame in the hardest possible tone.”