limitations. He does not appeal strongly to the
young, though he never forgets to tell a love story; but he is
too placid, matter-of-fact, unromantic for them. But if he do
not shake us with lyric passion, he is always interesting and he
wears uncommonly well. That his popularity is extending is
testified to by new editions and publishers' hullabaloo over his
work.

Such a fate is deserved by him, for Trollope is one of the most
consummate masters of that commonplace which has become the
modern fashion--and fascination. He has a wonderful power in the
realism which means getting close to the fact and the average
without making them uninteresting. So, naturally, as realism has
gained he has gained. No one except Jane Austen has surpassed
him in this power of truthful portrayal, and he has the
advantage of being practically of our own day. He insisted that
fiction should be objective, and refused to intrude himself into
the story, showing himself in this respect a better artist than
Thackeray, whom he much admired but frankly criticized. He was
unwilling to pause and harangue his audience in rotund voice
after the manner of Dickens, First among modern novelists,
Trollope stands invisible behind his characters, and this, as we
have seen, was to become one of the articles of the modern creed
of fiction. He affords us that peculiar pleasure which is
derived from seeing in a book what we instantly recognize as
familiar to us in life. Just why the pleasure, may be left to
the psychologists; but it is of indisputable charm, and Trollope
possesses it. We may talk wisely and at length of his
commonplaceness, lack of spice, philistinism; he can be counted
on to amuse us. He lived valiantly up to his own injunction: "Of
all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it is
readable." A simple test, this, but a terrible one that has
slain its thousands. No nineteenth century maker of stories is
safer in the matter of keeping the attention. If the book can be
easily laid down, it is always agreeable to take it up again.

Trollope set out in the most systematic way to produce a series
of novels illustrating certain sections of England, certain
types of English society; steadily, for a life-time, with the
artisan's skilful hand, he labored at the craft. He is the very
antithesis of the erraticisms and irregularities of genius. He
went to his daily stint of work, by night and day, on sea or
land, exactly as the merchant goes to h