nature, in rendering the primal
passions either solemn or terrible. Like Miss Austen, he attains
actuality by observation rather than by imagination, hardly ever
entering the sphere of poetry.

His range was not wide, for he could not present either grand
characters or tragical situations, any more than he could break out
into the splendid humour of Dickens. His wings never raised him far
above the level floor of earth. But within that limited range he had
surprising fertility. His clerical portrait-gallery is the most
complete that any English novelist has given us. No two faces are
exactly alike, and yet all are such people as one might see any day in
the pulpit. So, again, there is scarcely one of his stories in which a
young lady is not engaged, formally or practically, to two men at the
same time, or one man more or less committed to two women; yet no
story repeats exactly the situation, or raises the problem of honour
and duty in quite the same form as it appears in the stories that went
before. Few people who have written so much have so little appeared to
be exhausting their invention.

It must, however, be admitted that Trollope's fame might have stood
higher if he had written less. The public which had been delighted
with his earlier groups of novels, and especially with that group in
which _The Warden_ comes first and _Barchester Towers_ second, began
latterly to tire of what they had come to deem the mannerisms of their
favourite, and felt that they now knew the compass of his gifts.
Partly, perhaps, because he feared to be always too like himself, he
once or twice attempted to represent more improbable situations and
exceptional personages. But the attempt was not successful. He lost
his touch of ordinary life without getting into any higher region of
poetical truth; and in his latest stories he had begun to return to
his earlier and better manner.

New tendencies, moreover, embodying themselves in new schools, were
already beginning to appear. R. L. Stevenson as leader of the school
of adventure, Mr. Henry James as the apostle of the school of
psychological analysis, soon to be followed by Mr. Kipling with a type
of imaginative directness distinctively his own, were beginning to
lead minds and tastes into other directions. The influence of France
was more felt than it had been when Trollope began to write. And what
a contrast between Trollope's manner and that of his chief French
contemporaries, such a