Trollope was a more strict and
masterly realist than Thackeray, and even those who would call his
personages "types" would admit that they are as vivid as characters. It
was a bustling but a quiet world that he described: politics before the
coming of the Irish and the Socialists; the Church in the lull between
the Oxford Movement and the modern High Anglican energy. And it is
notable in the Victorian spirit once more that though his clergymen are
all of them real men and many of them good men, it never really occurs
to us to think of them as the priests of a religion.

Charles Reade may be said to go along with these; and Disraeli and even
Kingsley; not because these three very different persons had anything
particular in common, but because they all fell short of the first rank
in about the same degree. Charles Reade had a kind of cold coarseness
about him, not morally but artistically, which keeps him out of the best
literature as such: but he is of importance to the Victorian development
in another way; because he has the harsher and more tragic note that has
come later in the study of our social problems. He is the first of the
angry realists. Kingsley's best books may be called boys' books. There
is a real though a juvenile poetry in _Westward Ho!_ and though that
narrative, historically considered, is very much of a lie, it is a good,
thundering honest lie. There are also genuinely eloquent things in
_Hypatia_, and a certain electric atmosphere of sectarian excitement
that Kingsley kept himself in, and did know how to convey. He said he
wrote the book in his heart's blood. This is an exaggeration, but there
is a truth in it; and one does feel that he may have relieved his
feelings by writing it in red ink. As for Disraeli, his novels are able
and interesting considered as everything except novels, and are an
important contribution precisely because they are written by an alien
who did not take our politics so seriously as Trollope did. They are
important again as showing those later Victorian changes which men like
Thackeray missed. Disraeli did do something towards revealing the
dishonesty of our politics--even if he had done a good deal towards
bringing it about.

Between this group and the next there hovers a figure very hard to
place; not higher in letters than these, yet not easy to class with
them; I mean Bulwer Lytton. He was no greater than they were; yet
somehow he seems to take up more space. He did n