character, tinged, especially in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, with very intense and ambitious colours of passion.  The great popularity of this tempted her into still more elaborate efforts of different kinds.  Her attempt in quasi-historical romance, Romola (1865), was an enormous tour de force in which the writer struggled to get historical and local colour, accurate and irreproachable, with all the desperation of the most conscientious relater of actual history. Felix Holt the Radical (1866), Middle March (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876) were equally elaborate sketches of modern English society, planned and engineered with the same provision of carefully laboured plot, character, and phrase.  Although received with enthusiasm by the partisans whom she had created for herself, these books have seemed to some over-laboured, and if not exactly unreal, yet to a certain extent unnatural.  But the point for us is their example of the way in which the novel—­once a light and almost frivolous thing—­had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness—­had in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and begun to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete’s processes in the reader.  Its state may or may not have advanced in grace pari passu with the advance in effort and in dignity:  but this later advance is at least there.  Fielding himself took novel-writing by no means lightly, and Richardson still less so:  but imagine either, imagine Scott or even Miss Austen, going through the preliminary processes which seemed necessary, in different ways, to Charles Reade and to Mary Ann Evans!

In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all:  and qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him.  Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly orageuse, but apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has described in The Three Clerks (1858) and The Small House at Allington (1864), attained a considerable position in the Post Office which he held during great part of his career as a novelist.  For some time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is sometimes thought.  But he made his mark first with The Warden (1855), and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel Barchester Towers (1857).  When the first of these was published Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray had “come to his own” for nearly ten. The Warden might have been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter