ral candidate. He stood for the city of Oxford, and
the story was current there for years afterwards how the freemen of
the borough (not an exemplary class of voters) rose to an unwonted
height of virtue by declaring that though they did not understand his
speeches or know who he was, they would vote for him, expecting
nothing, because he was a friend of Mr. Neate's. Trollope showed his
continued interest in public affairs by appearing on the platform at
the great meeting in St. James's Hall in December 1876, which was the
beginning of a vehement party struggle over the Eastern Question that
only ended at the general election of 1880. He was a direct and
forcible speaker, who would have made his way had he entered
Parliament. But as he had no practical experience of politics either in
the House of Commons or as a working member of a party organisation in
a city where contests are keen, the pictures of political life which are
so frequent in his later tales have not much flavour of reality. They
are sketches obviously taken from the outside. Very rarely do even the
best writers of fiction succeed in reproducing any special and
peculiar kind of life and atmosphere. Of the various stories that
purport to describe what goes on in the English Parliament, none
gives to those who know the social conditions and habits of the place
an impression of truth to nature, and the same has often been
remarked with regard to tales of English University life. Trollope,
however, with his quick eye for the superficial aspects of any
society, might have described the House of Commons admirably had he
sat in it himself. He was fond of travel, and between 1862 and 1880
visited the United States, the West Indies, Australia and New
Zealand, and South Africa, about all of which he wrote books which, if
hardly of permanent value, were fresh, vigorous, and eminently
readable, conveying a definite and generally correct impression of the
more obvious social and economic phenomena he found then existing.
His account of the United States, for instance, is excellent, and did
something to make the Americans forgive the asperity with which his
mother had described her experiences there many years before.
Trollope's travel sketches are as much superior in truthfulness to
Froude's descriptions of the same regions as they are inferior in the
allurements of style.

The old classification of novels, based on the two most necessary
elements of a drama, divided