at life were already, when his latest books were
written, beginning to change, and the features he drew are fast
receding into history. Even the clergy of 1852-1862 are no longer,
except in quiet country districts, the same as the clergy we now see.

People have often compared the personal impressions which eminent
writers make on those who talk to them with the impressions previously
derived from their works. Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning used to
be taken as two instances representing opposite extremes. Carlyle
always talked in character: had there been phonographs in his days,
the phonographed "record" might have been printed as part of one of
his books. Browning, on the other hand, seemed unlike what his poems
had made a reader expect: it was only after a long _tete-a-tete_ with
him that the poet whose mind had been learned through his works stood
revealed. Trollope at first caused a similar though less marked
surprise. This bluff burly man did not seem the kind of person who
would trace with a delicate touch the sunlight sparkling on, or a gust
of temper ruffling, the surface of a youthful soul in love. Upon
further knowledge one perceived that the features of Trollope's
talent, facile invention, quick observation, and a strong common-sense
view of things, with little originality or intensity, were really the
dominant features of his character as expressed in talk. Still, though
the man was more of a piece with his books than he had seemed, one
could never quite recognise in him the delineator of Lily Dale.

As a painter of manners he recalls two of his predecessors--one
greater, one less great than himself. In his limitations and in his
fidelity to the aspects of daily life as he saw them, he resembles
Miss Austen. He is inferior to her in delicacy of portraiture, in
finish, in atmosphere. No two of his books can be placed on a level
with _Emma_ and _Persuasion_. On the other hand, while he has done for
the years 1850-1870 what Miss Burney did for 1770-1790, most critics
will place him above her both in fertility and in naturalness. Her
characters are apt either to want colour, like the heroines of
_Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, or to be so exaggerated, like Mr. Briggs and
Miss Larolles, as to approach the grotesque. Trollope is a realist in
the sense of being, in all but a few of his books, on the lines of
normal humanity, though he is seldom strong enough to succeed, when he
pierces down to the bed-rock of human