ood high; and though other novelists may have had as many
readers as he, none was in so many ways representative of the general
character and spirit of English fiction. He had established his
reputation nearly thirty years before, when Thackeray and Dickens were
still in the fulness of their fame; and had maintained it during the
zenith of George Eliot's. For more than a generation his readers had
come from the best-educated classes as well as from those who lack
patience or taste for anything heavier than a story of adventure. In
this respect he stood above Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ouida, and
other heroines of the circulating libraries, and also above such more
artistic or less sensational writers as William Black, Walter Besant,
James Payn, and Whyte Melville. (The school of so-called realistic
fiction had scarcely begun to appear.) None of these had, like
Trollope, succeeded in making their creations a part of the common
thought of cultivated Englishmen; none had, like him, given us
characters which we treat as typical men and women, and discuss at a
dinner-table as though they were real people. Mrs. Proudie, for
instance, the Bishop of Barchester's wife, to take the most obvious
instance (though not that most favourable to Trollope, for he produced
better portraits than hers), or Archdeacon Grantly, was when Trollope
died as familiar a name to English men and women between sixty and
thirty years of age as Wilkins Micawber, or Blanche Amory, or Rosamond
Lydgate. There was no other living novelist of whose personages the
same could be said, and perhaps none since has attained this
particular kind of success.

Personally, Anthony Trollope was a bluff, genial, hearty, vigorous
man, typically English in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes.
His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were
full of good-humoured life and force; and though he was neither witty
nor brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good
company, having travelled widely, known all sorts of people, and
formed views, usually positive views, on all the subjects of the day,
views which he was prompt to declare and maintain. There was not much
novelty in them--you were disappointed not to find so clever a writer
more original--but they were worth listening to for their solid
common-sense, tending rather to commonplace sense, and you enjoyed the
ardour with which he threw himself into a discussion. Though
boister