ichardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and
Scott put into the mouths of their heroes and heroines elaborate
speeches, poetry, eloquence, and epigrams which are no more like real
speech than the allocutions of kings and queens in Shakespeare are like
natural talk. That has long been discarded. Jane Austen and Thackeray
make their men and women discourse as men and women do. But perhaps
with Thackeray, the talk is too racy, too brilliant, too rich with wit,
humour, and character, to be quite literally truthful. Now, Trollope,
taking a far lower and simpler line, makes his characters talk with
literal truth to nature.

This photographic realism of conversation is common enough now: but it
has too often the defects of photography; it is bleared, coarse, and
ill-favoured. As we all know, in the new realism a young woman and her
lover talk thus: "Old gal! why so glum?" said he--"It's my luck!" says
she, and flings her straw hat on the floor. That is the new
photographic style, but it does not please us of an older generation.
Now Trollope makes his people utter such phrases as the characters he
presents to us actually use in real life--or rather such phrases as
they did use thirty years ago. And yet, although he hardly ever rises
into eloquence, wit, brilliancy, or sinks into any form of talk either
unnaturally tall, or unnaturally low,--still, the conversations are
just sufficiently pointed, humorous, or characteristic, to amuse the
reader and develop the speaker's character. Trollope in this exactly
hits the happy mean. Like Mr. Woodhouse's gruel, his conversations are
"thin--but not so very thin." He never attempts grandiloquence; but
then he never sinks into the fashionable bathos of--"Sugar in your tea,
dear?"--"Another lump, if you please,"--nor does he fall into the
fashionable realism of--"Dry up, old man!" No! Trollope's characters
speaks with literal nature; and yet with enough of point, humour,
vigour, to make it pleasant reading.

We may at once confess to his faults and limitations. They are plain
enough, constant, and quite incapable of defence. Out of his sixty
works, I should be sorry to pick more than ten as being worth a second
reading, or twenty which are worth a first reading. Nor amongst the
good books could I count any of the last ten years. The range of
characters is limited to the clergy and professional men of a cathedral
city, to the county families and the respectabilities of a quiet
vill