e for the future certain phases of life in the
nineteenth century in England with minute fidelity and the most literal
realism.

This is no doubt the cause of the revulsion of opinion by which in some
English circles Trollope has suffered of late. If there are fashions,
habits, and tastes which the rising generation is certain to despise,
it is such as were current in the youth of their own parents about
thirty or forty years before them. The collars, the bonnets, the
furniture, the etiquette, the books of that age always seem to the
young to be the last word of all that is awkward and "bad form,"
although in two or three generations these very modes regain a certain
quaint charm. And for the moment poor Anthony represents to the
emancipated youth of our time all that was "banal" and prosy some
thirty years ago. The taste of our youth sets hard for a new heaven,
or at least a new earth, and if not that, it may be a new hell. Novels
or poems without conundrums, without psychologic problems, with no
sexual theorems to solve, with no unique idiosyncrasies to fathom,
without anything unnatural, or sickening, without hospital
nastinesses,--are all, we are assured, unworthy the notice of the youth
of either sex who are really up to date. In the style of the new
pornographic and clinical school of art, the sayings and doings of
wholesome men and women who live in drawing-rooms and regularly dress
before dinner are "beastly rot," and fit for no one but children and
old maids.

But we conservatives of an older school are grateful to Anthony that he
produced for the last generation an immense collection of pleasant
tales without a single foul spot or unclean incident. It was his boast
that he had never written a line which a pure woman could not read
without a blush. This is no doubt one of the grounds on which he is so
often denounced as _passe_. His tales, of course, are full of love,
and the love is not always discreet or virtuous. There are cases of
guilty love, of mad love, of ungoverned and unreasoning passion. But
there is not an impure or prurient passage in the whole library of
tales. Much more than this: in the centre of almost every tale, we are
taken to the heart of a spotless, loving, refined, brave English girl.
In nothing does Anthony Trollope delight more than when he unveils to
us the secret thoughts of a noble-hearted maiden who loves strongly but
who has a spirit as strong as her love, a clear bra