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them into novels of plot and novels of character. To these we have of late years added novels of incident or adventure, novels of conversation, novels of manners, not to speak of "novels with a purpose," which are sermons or pamphlets in disguise. No one doubted to which of these categories Trollope's work should be referred. There was in his stories as little plot as a story can well have. The conversations never beamed with humour like that of Scott, nor glittered with aphorisms like those of George Meredith. The incidents carried the reader pleasantly along, but seldom surprised him by any ingenuity of contrivance. Character there was, and, indeed, great fertility in the creation of character, for there is hardly one of the tales in which three or four at least of the personages do not stand out as people whom you would know again if you met them years after. But the conspicuous merit of Trollope's novels, in the eyes of his own countrymen, is their value as pictures of contemporary manners. Here he may claim to have been surpassed by no writer of his own generation. Dickens, with all his great and splendid gifts, did not describe the society he lived in. His personages were too unusual and peculiar to speak and act and think like the ordinary men and women of the nineteenth century; nor would a foreigner, however much he might enjoy the exuberant humour and dramatic power with which they are presented, learn from them much about the ways and habits of the average Englishman. The everyday life to which the stories are most true is the life of the lower middle class in London; and some one has observed that although this class changes less quickly than the classes above it, it is already unlike that which Dickens saw when in the 'thirties he was a police-court reporter. Critics have, indeed, said that Dickens was too great a painter to be a good photographer, but the two arts are not incompatible, as appears from the skill with which Walter Scott, for instance, portrayed the peasantry of his own country in _The Antiquary_. Thackeray, again, though he has described certain sections of the upper or upper middle class with far more power and delicacy than Trollope ever reached, does not go beyond those sections, and has little to tell us about the middle class generally, still less about the classes beneath them. Trollope was thoroughly at home in the English middle class and also (though less perfectly) in the upper cl
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