s Octave Feuillet or Alphonse Daudet or Guy de
Maupassant! The French novelists, be their faculty of invention
greater or less, at any rate studied their characters with more care
than English writers had usually shown. The characters were fewer,
almost as few as in a classical drama; and the whole action of the
story is carefully subordinated to the development of these
characters, and the placing of them in a critical position which sets
their strength and weakness in the fullest light. There was more of a
judicious adaptation of the parts to the whole in French fiction than
in ours, and therefore more unity of impression was attained.
Trollope, no doubt, set a bad example in this respect. He crowded his
canvas with figures; he pursued the fortunes of three or four sets of
people at the same time, caring little how the fate of the one set
affected that of the others; he made his novel a sort of chronicle
which you might open anywhere and close anywhere, instead of a drama
animated by one idea and converging towards one centre. He neglected
the art which uses incidents small in themselves to lead up to the
_denoument_ and make it more striking. He took little pains with his
diction, seeming not to care how he said what he had to say. These
defects strike those who turn over his pages to-day. But to those who
read him in the 'fifties or 'sixties, the carelessness was redeemed
by, or forgotten in, the vivacity with which the story moved, the
freshness and faithfulness of its pictures of character and manners.

-----

[21] Trollope's autobiography, published in 1883, is a good specimen
of self-portraiture, candid, straightforward, and healthy, and
leaves an agreeable impression of the writer. Dr. Richard
Garnett has written well of him in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_.

JOHN RICHARD GREEN[22]

John Richard Green was born in Oxford on 12th December 1837, and
educated first at Magdalen College School, and afterwards, for a short
time, at a private tutor's. He was a singularly quick and bright boy,
and at sixteen obtained by competition a scholarship at Jesus College,
Oxford, where he began to reside in 1856. The members of that college
were in those days almost entirely Welshmen, and thereby somewhat cut
off from the rest of the University. They saw little of men in other
colleges, so that a man might have a reputation for ability in his own
society without gaining any in