l in his tea-cup
of a diocese; the pompous ecclesiastic with wounded dignity and family
quarrels; the over-sensitive priest whose conscience is more acute than
his brain; the weak, generous, cowardly owner of an embarrassed estate;
the honest and impulsive youth placed between love and duty; the loving
girl who will not sacrifice dignity to love; the public official who is
torn between conscience and self-interest; the man in a great position
who does not know his own mind; the man with honest principles who is
tempted above his strength by love, ambition, or ruin--all of these
live in the pages of Trollope with perfect truth to nature and reality
of movement. It would be too much to say that any of them are masterly
creations, unless it be Crawley and the Proudies, but they are
absolutely truthful, real, living portraits. The situations are not
very striking, but then they are perfectly natural. And the characters
never say or do a thing which oversteps by a hair's-breadth the
probable and natural conduct of such persons.

All this is now said to be commonplace, goody-goody, and Philistine.
There are no female acrobats, burglars, gutter-urchins, crapulous
prostitutes, no pathological anatomy of diseased bodies and carious
souls, hardly a single case of adultery in all Trollope. But they who
can exist without these stimulants may find pleasant reading yet in his
best work. _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ is a really good tale which
deserves to live, and the whole Crawley episode rises to the level of
fine imaginative work. _Doctor Thorne_ is a sound, pleasant, ingenious
story from beginning to end. It has perhaps the best plot of all
Trollope's books, and, singularly enough, it is the only plot which he
admits not to be his own. I count Mary Thorne as his best woman and
Doctor Thorne as one of his best men. The unity of _Doctor Thorne_ is
very striking and ingenious. The stage is crowded: there are nearly a
score of well-marked characters and five distinct households; but the
whole series works into the same plot; the scene is constantly varied,
and yet there is no double plot or separate companies. Thus, though
the whole story revolves round the fortunes of a single family, the
interest and the movement never flag for a page. The machinery is very
simple; the characters are of average strength and merit; the incidents
and issues are ordinary enough. And the general effect is wholesome,
manly, womanly, refin