t the gulf was as wide as ever.

Anthony Trollope was not, like 'Punch,' a mere interpreter of what was
upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and
subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget
that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon
do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer
conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must
often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given 'Orley
Farm'? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir
Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? 'As she slowly made her way
across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had now
fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us--I trust
but of few--when with the silent inner voice of suffering'--and here,
in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he seldom
writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon be
plain, ask you not to skip a word--'we call on the mountains to fall
and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in--when with
an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these
moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for
their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept
silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the
entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in
the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible
to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her
in. This was her burden, and she must,' etc., etc.

You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't any
bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when 'Orley
Farm' was published. Servants really were 'most desolate' in those days,
and 'their sufferings' were less acute only than those of gentlewomen
who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well it was the view
held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust Trollope.

Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be
crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant
girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words,
how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they
were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this me