[Barset]

When Slope attempts to embrace Eleanor Bold In the Thorne's garden..."She sprang from him as she would have jumped from an adder...then, quick as thought, she raised her little hand and dealt him a box on the ear with such right good will, that it sounded among the trees like a miniature thunder-clap."

And Slope "longed in his heart to be preaching at her....He had an inkling---a true inkling---that he was a wicked, sinful man; but it led him in no right direction; he could admit no charity in his heart.

He felt debasement coming on him, and he longed to shake it off, to rise up in his stirrup, to mount to high places and great power, that he might get up into a mighty pulpit and preach to the world a loud sermon against Mrs. Bold"

In the 1970's Kerry preached eloquently from his little perch,against America, against the young men still being killed in Vietnam, against the possibility that freedom was infinitely better than tyranny.

Now, like Slope, Kerry wants "to mount to high places and great power" with no understanding of the uses of power except to feed his smug conceit, his bottomless vanity.

[AnAmericanMother]

Who is John "Obadiah Slope" Kerry's Mrs. Proudie? And who, I wonder, is his Signora Vesey Neroni?

[AnAmericanMother]

I love that scene with Eleanor and Mr. Slope at the garden party. I hope the voters turn Kerry out with the same vehemence that Mrs. Proudie used with Mr. Slope.

I never could figure out why Eleanor would have married John Bold in the first place. (I don't think Mr. Trollope had fully thought out his characters when he wrote The Warden, and as the chronicles grew they probably surprised him a little bit.) At least she redeemed herself by marrying Dean Arabin.