is his business
to be garrulous; we want him to talk about himself, and to give us such
peeps into his own heart and brain as he chooses to unlock. That is
what an "autobiography" means. And never did man do this in a more
hearty, manly, good-tempered spirit, with more good sense, with more
modest _bonhomie_, with a more genial egoism. He has been an enormous
worker; he is proud of his industry. He has fought his way under cruel
hardships to wealth and fame: and he is well satisfied with his
success. He has had millions of readers; he has been well paid; he has
had good friends; he has enjoyed life. He is happy in telling us how
he did it. He does not overrate himself. He believes some of his work
is good: at least it is honest, pure, sound work which has pleased
millions of readers. Much of his work he knows to be poor stuff, and
he says so at once. He makes no pretence to genius; he does not claim
to be a hero; he has no rare qualities--or none but industry and
courage--and he has met with no peculiar sufferings and no cruel and
undeserved rebuffs. He has his own ideas about literary work--you may
think them commonplace, mechanical, mercenary ideas--but that is a true
picture of Anthony Trollope; of his strong, manly, pure mind, of his
clear head, of his average moral sense: a good fellow, a warm friend, a
brave soul, a genial companion.

With all his artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took
a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic
discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George
Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] "Why!" said Anthony,
"I sit down every morning at 5.30 with my watch on my desk, and for
three hours I regularly produce 250 words every quarter of an hour."
George Eliot positively quivered with horror at the thought--she who
could write only when she felt in the vein, who wrote, re-wrote, and
destroyed her manuscript two or three times, and as often as not sat at
her table without writing at all. "There are days and days together,"
she groaned out, "when I cannot write a line." "Yes!" said Trollope,
"with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my
mechanical stuff it's a sheer matter of industry. It's not the head
that does it--it's the cobbler's wax on the seat and the sticking to my
chair!" In his _Autobiography_ he has elaborately explained this
process--how he wrote day by day, including