Trollope was a voluminous writer:  he gives in his delightful autobiography the list of his own works and it numbers upwards of sixty titles, of which over forty are fiction.  His capacity for writing, judged by mere bulk, appears to have been inherited; for his mother, turning authoress at fifty years of age, produced no less than one hundred and fourteen volumes!  There is inferior work, and plenty of it, among the sum-total of his activity, but two series, amounting to about twenty books, include the fiction upon which his fame so solidly rests:  the Cathedral series and the Parliamentary series.  In the former, choosing the southern-western counties of Wiltshire and Hants as Hardy chose Wessex for his peculiar venue, he described the clerical life of his land as it had never been described before, showing the type as made up of men like unto other men, unromantic, often this-worldly and smug, yet varying the type, making room for such an idealist as Crawley as well as for sleek bishops and ecclesiastical wire-pullers.  Neither his young women nor his holy men are overdrawn a jot:  they have the continence of Nature.  But they are not cynically presented.  You like them and take pleasure in their society; they are so beautifully true!  The inspiration of these studies came to him as he walked under the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral; and one is never far away from the influence of the cathedral class.  The life is the worldy-godly life of that microcosm, a small, genteel, conventional urban society; in sharp contrast with the life depicted by Hardy in the same part of the land,—­but like another world, because his portraiture finds its subjects among peasant-folk and yeoman—­the true primitive types whose speech is slow and their roots deep down in the soil.

The realism of Trollope was not confined to the mere reproduction of externals; he gave the illusion of character, without departing from what can be verified by what men know.  His photographs were largely imaginary, as all artistic work must be; he constructed his stories out of his own mind.  But all is based on what may be called a splendidly reasoned and reasonable experience with Life.  His especial service was thus to instruct us about English society, without tedium, within a domain which was voluntarily selected for his own.  In this he was also a pioneer in that local fiction which is a geographical effect of realism.  And to help him in this setting down of what he believed to be true of humanity, was a style so lucid and simple as perfectly to serve his purpose.  For unobtrusive ease, idiomatic naturalness and that familiarity which escapes vulgarity and retains a quiet distinction, no one has excelled him.  It is one reason why we feel an intimate knowledge of his characters.  Mr. Howells declares it is Trollope who is most like Austen “in simple honesty and instinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light of common day”—­though he goes on to deplore that he too often preferred to be “like the caricaturist Thackeray”—­a somewhat hard saying.  It is a particular comfort to read such a writer when intensely personal psychology is the order of the day and neither style nor interpretation in fiction is simple.