he wanted.
This ease and mastery over speech was the fruit of prodigious practice
and industry both in office work and in literary work. It is a mastery
which conceals itself, and appears to the reader the easiest thing in
the world. How few out of many millions have studied that subtle
mechanism of ear and thought which created the melodious ripple of
these fluent and pellucid words.

His work has one special quality that has not been sufficiently
noticed. It has the most wonderful unity of texture and a perfect
harmony of tone. From the first line to the last, there is never a
sentence or a passage which strikes a discordant note; we are never
worried by a spasmodic phrase, nor bored by fine writing that fails to
"come off." Nor is there ever a paragraph which we need to read over
again, or a phrase that looks obscure, artificial, or enigmatic. This
can hardly be said of any other novelist of this century, except of
Jane Austen, for even Thackeray himself is now and then artificial in
_Esmond_, and the vulgarity of _Yellowplush_ at last becomes fatiguing.
Now Trollope reproduces for us that simplicity, unity, and ease of Jane
Austen, whose facile grace flows on like the sprightly talk of a
charming woman, mistress of herself and sure of her hearers. This
uniform ease, of course, goes with the absence of all the greatest
qualities of style; absence of any passion, poetry, mystery, or
subtlety. He never rises, it is true, to the level of the great
masters of language. But, for the ordinary incidents of life amongst
well-bred and well-to-do men and women of the world, the form of
Trollope's tales is almost as well adapted as the form of Jane Austen.

In absolute realism of spoken words Trollope has hardly any equal. His
characters utter quite literally the same words, and no more, that such
persons utter in actual life. The characters, it is true, are the
average men and women we meet in the educated world, and the
situations, motives, and feelings described are seldom above or below
the ordinary incidents of modern life. But within this very limited
range of incident, and for this very common average of person and
character, the conversations are photographic or stenographic
reproductions of actual speech. His letters, especially his young
ladies' letters, are singularly real, life-like, and characteristic.
We have long got rid of the artificial eloquence and the studied
witticisms of the older school. R