celand, it should simply run--that Anthony Trollope has no place at
all in Victorian literature. We did not think so in England in the
fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Victorian
romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this
last quinquennium of our century. I shall have to put our friend
Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my
sense of his modest claims and conspicuous faults, of his prolixity,
his limited sphere, his commonplace. But in view of the enormous
popularity he once enjoyed, of the space he filled for a whole
generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of the
Victorian writers.

I have, too, a personal reason for including him in the series. I knew
him well, knew his subjects, and his stage. I have seen him at work at
the "Megatherium Club," chatted with him at the "Universe," dined with
him at George Eliot's, and even met him in the hunting-field. I was
familiar with the political personages and crises which he describes;
and much of the local colouring in which his romances were framed was
for years the local colouring that I daily saw around me. Most of the
famous writers of whom I have been speaking in this series (with the
exception of Charlotte Bronte) I have often seen and heard speak in
public and in private, but I cannot be said to have known them as
friends. But Anthony Trollope I knew well. I knew the world in which
he lived, I saw the scenes, the characters, the life he paints, day by
day in the same clubs, in the same rooms, and under the same conditions
as he saw them. To re-read some of his best stories, as I have just
done, is to me like looking through a photographic album of my
acquaintances, companions, and familiar reminiscences of some thirty
years ago. I can hear the loud voice, the honest laugh, see the keen
eyes of our old friend as I turn to the admirable vignette portrait in
his posthumous _Autobiography_, and I can almost hear him tell the
anecdotes recounted in that pleasant book.

Does the present generation know that frank and amusing book--one of
the most brisk and manly autobiographies in our language? Of course it
is garrulous, egoistical, self-complacent in a way. When a famous
writer, at the close of a long career of varied activity, takes up his
pen to tell us how he has lived, and how his books were written, and
what he has loved, seen, suffered, and striven for--it