t has also been said) was a novel of
more or less ordinary life, ranging from the lower middle to the upper
class, correctly observed, diversified by sufficient incident not of an
extravagant kind, and furnished with description and conversation not
too epigrammatic but natural and fairly clever. This norm Trollope hit
with surprising justness, and till the demand altered a little or his
own hand failed (perhaps there was something of both) he continued to
hit it. His interests and experiences were fairly wide; for, besides
being active in his Post Office duties at home and abroad, he was an
enthusiastic fox-hunter, fairly fond of society and of club-life,
ambitious enough at least to try other paths than those of fiction in
his _Thackeray_ (a failure), his _Cicero_ (a worse failure), and other
things. And everything that he saw he could turn into excellent
novel-material. No one has touched him in depicting the humours of a
public office, few in drawing those of cathedral cities and the
hunting-field. If his stories, as stories, are not of enthralling
interest or of very artfully constructed plots, their craftsmanship in
this respect leaves very little to complain of. And he can sometimes, as
in the Stanhope family of _Barchester Towers_, in Mrs. Proudie _passim_,
in Madalina Demolines, and in others, draw characters very little
removed from those who live with us for ever. It is extremely improbable
that there will ever be a much better workman of his own class; and his
books are certainly, at their best, far better than all but one or two
that appear, not merely in any given year nowadays, but in any given
lustrum. Yet the special kind of their excellence, the facts that they
reflect their time without transcending it, and that in the way of
merely reflective work each time prefers its own workmen and is never
likely to find itself short of them, together with the great volume of
Trollope's production, are certainly against him; and it is hard even
for those who enjoyed him most, and who can still enjoy him, to declare
positively that there is enough of the permanent and immortal in him to
justify the hope of a resurrection.

In Charles Reade, on the other hand, there is undoubtedly something of
this permanent or transcendent element, though less perhaps than some
fervent admirers of his have claimed. He was born on June 1814 at Ipsden
in Oxfordshire, where his family had been some time seated as squires.
He had no p