ious
but imperfect phenomenon, back there in the middle century.
He worked in a way deserving of the descriptive phrase once
applied to Macaulay--"a steam engine in breeches;" he put
enough belief and heart into his fiction to float any literary
vessel upon the treacherous waters of fame. He had, of the more
specific qualities of a novelist, racy idiom, power in creating
character and a remarkable gift for plot and dramatic scene.
His frankly melodramatic novels like "A Terrible Temptation"
are among the best of their kind, and in "The Cloister and
the Hearth" he performed the major literary feat of
reconstructing, with the large imagination and humanity
which obliterate any effect of archeology and worked-up
background, a period long past. And what reader of English
fiction does not harbor more than kindly sentiments for those
very different yet equally lovable women, Christie Johnstone and
Peg Woffington? To run over his contributions thus is to feel
the heart grow warm towards the sturdy story-teller. Reade also
played a part, as did Kingsley, in the movement for recognition
of the socially unfit and those unfairly treated. "Put Yourself
in His Place," with its early word on the readjustment of labor
troubles, is typical of much that he strove to do. Superb
partisan that he was, it is probable that had he cared less for
polemics and more for his art, he would have secured a safer
position in the annals of fiction. He can always be taken up and
enjoyed for his earnest conviction or his story for the story's
sake, even if on more critical evaluations he comes out not so
well as men of lesser caliber.

V

The writer of the group who has consistently gained ground and
has come to be generally recognized as a great artist, a force
in English fiction both for influence and pleasure-giving power,
is Anthony Trollope. He is vital to-day and strengthening his
hold upon the readers of fiction. The quiet, cultivated folk in
whose good opinion lies the destiny of really worthy literature,
are, as a rule, friendly to Trollope; not seldom they are
devoted to him. Such people peruse him in an enjoyably
ruminative way at their meals, or read him in the neglige of
retirement. He is that cosy, enviable thing, a bedside author.
He is above all a story-teller for the middle-aged and it is his
good fortune to be able to sit and wait for us at that half-way
house,--since we all arrive. Of course, to say this is to
acknowledge his