A paragon of nobility and idleness dies

The idle suitor Gerald Maule's father is introduced -- a man equally lazy and, what's more, has an ideology of laziness. An aesthete with little income, Mr. Maule Senior is also vain and determined to hold onto what is left of his youth. "No one kenw better than Mr. Maule that the continuing bloom of lasting summer which he affected requires great accuracy in living. Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age."

Now 55, Maule, in his boyhood, "he had been one of those show boys of which two or three are generally to be found at our great schools . . . Winning prizes, spouting speeches on Speech Days, playing in Elevens, and looking always handsome."

At his club, Maule apostrophizes the dying Duke of Omnium, who hour area as a paragon of aristocratic idleness, as opposed to the younger generation of working nobles, whom he detests: "they all go in for something now . . . They are politicians or gamblers, or, by heaven tradesmen. The Earl of Tydvil and Lord Merthyr are in partnership together working their own mines, -- by the Lord, with a regular deed of partnership, just like two cheesemongers." Omnium, however, is a paragon of nobility: "perhaps no man who had lived during the same period, or any portion of the period, had done less, or had devoted himself more entirely to to the consumption of good things without the slightest idea of producing anything in return!"

Parliament as a matter of families and heredity in the view of the Whighish Barrington Earl: "I do believe in the patriotism of certain families. I believe that the Mildmays, FitzHowards, and Pallisers have for some centuries brought up their children to regard the well-being of their country as their highest personal interest. . . . Of course there have been failures. But the school in which good
training is practiced will, as a rule, turn out the best scholars."

The yellow-journalist Quintus Slide of "The People's Banner" has
switched sides to the Conservatives, his duty to "speak of men as
heaven-born patriots whom he had designated a month or two before as
bloated aristocrats and leeches fattened on the blood of the people."

The staunch and honest radical Bunce mockingly says to Slide "I
suppose an editor's about the same as a Cabinet Minister, you've got to keep your place -- that's about it."

Trollope indicates Bunce's limitations: "Mr. Bunce was an outspoken, eager, and honest politician, -- with very little accurate knowledge
of the political conditions by which he was surrounded, but with a strong belief in the merits of his own class. He was a sober, hardworking man, and he hated all men who were not sober and
hardworking. He was quite clear in his mind that all nobility should
be put down, and that all property in land should be taken away from men who were enabled by such property to live in idleness. What
should be done with the land so taken away was a question which he
had not yet learned to answer." [Earlier, the good Mrs. Bunce had
confided to Phineas that she would rather her husband use his money
on drink rather than waste it on union dues].

Slide proposes to expose the marital rift between Robert Kennedy and Laura in "The People's Banner." Phineas objects that Kennedy is
clearly mad, to which Slide replies sanctimoniously "There is nothing easier in the world than calling a man mad. It's what we do to dogs when we want to hang them."

To Phineas' further objection that such a private affair is not of
public interest, Slide counters snidely that "private quarrels between gentlemen and ladies have been public affairs for a long time past" and that "the morals of our aristocracy would be at a low ebb indeed if the public press didn't act as their guardians . . . It's my belief that there isn't a peer among 'em all as would live with his wife constant, if it were not for the Press. . . . We go in for morals and purity of life, and we mean to do our duty by the public without fear or favor."

Phineas confronts the increasingly deranged Kennedy, who is staying at a dilapadated Scottish-owned hotel. Kennedy fires a shot at Phineas, who he believes to be his estranged wife's lover and the cause of all his agonies.

Omnium on his deathbed: "He was wan and worn and pale, -- a man evidently dying, the oil of whose lamp was all burned out. . . . He had never done any good, but he had always carried himself like a duke, and like a duke he carried himself to the end."

Omnium dies with the beloved of his years dotage, Mrs. Max Goesler, at his bedside. Mrs. Goesler reassures him that he lived life as a noble should, but Trollope opines that "her nature was much nobler than his: and she knew that no man should live as idly as the Duke had lived."

Omnium's successor as Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, has no interest in rank -- his passions are political and economic and his elevation of the House of Lords appalls him as it will make him ineligible to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Liberals return to power in the lower house.

Mr. Maule Senior sees Omnium's death as an opportunity to court the wealthy Mrs. Goesler. Lamenting Omnium's recent death and the political ambitions of his successor, the effete ner-do-well says to the Duke's companion of his fading years "I dare say that Mr. Palliser, as Mr. Palliser, has been a useful man. But so is a coal heaver a useful man. The grace and beauty of life will be clean gone when we all become useful men."

Of the Duke's great achievement in life, Maule says by way of epitaph that "a great fortune had been entrusted to him, and he knew it was his duty to spend it. He did spend it, and all the world looked up to him."

Of Maule, the canny Marie Goesler assesses him to Phineas as "a battered old beau about London, selfish and civil, pleasant and penniless, and I should think utterly without a principle."

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