said, and not without
justice, that much of the more vivid if coarser substance of her younger
son's humour is to be traced in it. The elder son, Thomas Adolphus, who
was born in 1810, and lived from 1841 for some half-century onwards in
Italy, was also a prolific novelist, and wrote much on Italian history;
while perhaps his best work was to be found in some short pieces,
combining history with a quasi-fictitious interest, which he contributed
to the periodicals edited by Dickens.

But neither mother nor elder brother could vie with Anthony, who was
born in 1815, was educated at Winchester and Harrow, spent the greater
part of his life as an official of the Post Office, and died in December
1882, leaving an enormous number of novels, which at one time were the
most popular, or almost the most popular, of their day, and to which
rather fastidious judges have found it difficult to refuse all but the
highest praise. Almost immediately after Trollope's death appeared an
_Autobiography_ in which, with praiseworthy but rather indiscreet
frankness, he detailed habits of work of a mechanical kind, the
confession of which played into the hands of those who had already begun
to depreciate him as a mere book-maker. It is difficult to say how many
novels he wrote, persevering as he did in composition up to the very
time of his death; and it is certain that the productions of his last
decade were, as a rule, very inferior to his best. This best is to be
found chiefly, but not entirely, in what is called the "Barsetshire"
series, clustering round a county and city which are more or less
exactly Hampshire and Winchester, beginning in 1855 with _The Warden_, a
good but rather immature sketch, and continuing through _Barchester
Towers_ (perhaps his masterpiece), _Doctor Thorne_, _Framley Parsonage_,
and _The Small House at Allington_ (the two latter among the early
triumphs of the _Cornhill Magazine_), to _The Last Chronicle of Barset_
(1867), which runs _Barchester Towers_ very hard, if it does not surpass
it. Other favourite books of his were _The Three Clerks_, _Orley Farm_,
_Can You Forgive Her_, and _Phineas Finn_--nor does this by any means
exhaust the list even of his good books.

It has been said that Trollope is a typical novelist, and the type is of
sufficient importance to receive a little attention, even in space so
jealously allotted as ours must be. The novel craved by and provided for
the public of this second period (i