and it numbers upwards
of sixty titles, of which over forty are fiction. His capacity
for writing, judged by mere bulk, appears to have been
inherited; for his mother, turning authoress at fifty years of
age, produced no less than one hundred and fourteen volumes!
There is inferior work, and plenty of it, among the sum-total of
his activity, but two series, amounting to about twenty books,
include the fiction upon which his fame so solidly rests: the
Cathedral series and the Parliamentary series. In the former,
choosing the southern-western counties of Wiltshire and Hants as
Hardy chose Wessex for his peculiar venue, he described the
clerical life of his land as it had never been described before,
showing the type as made up of men like unto other men,
unromantic, often this-worldly and smug, yet varying the type,
making room for such an idealist as Crawley as well as for sleek
bishops and ecclesiastical wire-pullers. Neither his young women
nor his holy men are overdrawn a jot: they have the continence
of Nature. But they are not cynically presented. You like them
and take pleasure in their society; they are so beautifully
true! The inspiration of these studies came to him as he walked
under the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral; and one is never far
away from the influence of the cathedral class. The life is the
worldy-godly life of that microcosm, a small, genteel,
conventional urban society; in sharp contrast with the life
depicted by Hardy in the same part of the land,--but like
another world, because his portraiture finds its subjects among
peasant-folk and yeoman--the true primitive types whose speech
is slow and their roots deep down in the soil.

The realism of Trollope was not confined to the mere
reproduction of externals; he gave the illusion of character,
without departing from what can be verified by what men know.
His photographs were largely imaginary, as all artistic work
must be; he constructed his stories out of his own mind. But all
is based on what may be called a splendidly reasoned and
reasonable experience with Life. His especial service was thus
to instruct us about English society, without tedium, within a
domain which was voluntarily selected for his own. In this he
was also a pioneer in that local fiction which is a geographical
effect of realism. And to help him in this setting down of what
he believed to be true of humanity, was a style so lucid and
simple as perfectly to serve his purpose.