in and a pure will.
In nothing is he more successful; nowhere is he more subtle, more true,
more interesting. In this fine gift, he surpasses all his
contemporaries, and almost all other English novelists. Mary Thorne,
Lily Dale, Lucy Roberts--I would almost add, Martha Dunstable--may not
be heroines of romance, and are certainly not great creations. But
they are pure, right-minded, delicate, brave women; and it does one
good to be admitted to the sacred confessional of their hearts.

It must be admitted that they are "young ladies," nurtured in the
conventional refinement of the last generation, high-bred, and trained
in the jealous sensitiveness of what was thought to be "maiden modesty"
thirty or forty years ago. That is their misfortune to-day; it is now
rather silly to be a "young lady" at all, and the old-fashioned "maiden
modesty" of their mothers and grandmothers is become positively
ridiculous. Young women of the present date, we are assured in the
language of our gilded youth, have to be either "jolly girls" or
"crocks"; and Mary Thorne and Lily Dale are certainly not "jolly
girls." Their trials and agonies are not different from those which
may happen in any ordinary family, and the problems they have to solve
are those which may await any girl at any time. But the subtle touches
with which we are admitted to their meditations, the delicate weighing
of competing counsels and motives, the living pulses of heart and
brain, and the essential soundness and reality of the mental and moral
crisis--are all told with an art that may be beneath that of Jane
Austen, but which certainly is akin to hers, and has the same quality
of pure and simple human nature. Pure and simple human nature is, for
the moment, out of fashion as the subject of modern romance. But it
remains a curious problem how the boisterous, brawny, thick-skinned
lump of manhood whom we knew as Anthony Trollope ever came to conceive
so many delicate and sensitive country maidens, and to see so deeply
and so truly into the heart of their maiden meditations.

Trollope is equally successful with some other social problems and
characters of unstable equilibrium. They are none of them very
profound or exalted studies in psychology; but they are truthful,
natural, and ingenious; and it needed a sure and delicate hand to make
them interesting and life-like. The feeble, solemn, timid, vacillating
bishop, driven to distraction by some clerical scanda