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ass; and his pictures are all the more true to life because there is not that vein of stern or cynical reflection which runs through Thackeray, and makes us think less of the story than of the moral. Trollope usually has a moral, but it is so obvious, so plainly and quietly put, that it does not distract attention from the minor incidents and little touches of every day which render the sketches lifelike. If even his best-drawn characters are not far removed from the commonplace this helps to make them fairly represent the current habits and notions of their time. They are the same people we meet in the street or at a dinner-party; and they are mostly seen under no more exciting conditions than those of a hunting meet, or a lawn-tennis match, or an afternoon tea. They are flirting or talking for effect, or scheming for some petty temporary end; they are not under the influence of strong passions, or forced into striking situations, like the leading characters in Charlotte Bronte's or George Eliot's novels; and for this reason again they represent faithfully the ordinary surface of English upper and upper middle class society: its prejudices, its little pharisaisms and hypocrisies, its snobbishness, its worship of conventionalities, its aloofness from or condescension to those whom it deems below its own level; and therewith also its public spirit, its self-helpfulness, its neighbourliness, its respect for honesty and straightforwardness, its easy friendliness of manner towards all who stand within the sacred pale of social recognition. Nor, again, has any one more skilfully noted and set down those transient tastes and fashions which are, so to speak, the trimmings of the dress, and which, transient though they are, and quickly forgotten by contemporaries, will have an interest for one who, a century or two hence, feels the same curiosity about our manners as we feel about those of the subjects of King George the Third. That Trollope will be read at all fifty years after his death one may hesitate to predict, considering how comparatively few in the present generation read Richardson, or Fielding, or Miss Edgeworth, or Charlotte Bronte, and how much reduced is the number of those who read even Walter Scott and Thackeray. But whoever does read Trollope in 1930 will gather from his pages better than from any others an impression of what everyday life was like in England in the "middle Victorian" period. The aspects of th
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