villainous, and affords, perhaps, the best general view of the author’s varied talents.  Sir Bulwer Lytton is one of the most voluminous writers of a very prolific class, and yet he has never repeated himself.  Mr. Anthony Trollope and several other novelists have shown how fallacious is the idea that the imagination is a fickle mistress to be courted and waited for.  They have proved that she can be made to settle down and accustomed by habit to working at stated hours and for regular periods.  But Bulwer Lytton not only forced his imagination to continuous labor, but he was able to insure an unending novelty of conception.  In each one of his novels we are introduced to an entirely new set of characters inhabiting quite unfamiliar scenes.

With a few exceptions, Mr. Anthony Trollope has confined himself to the novel of English social life, but that mine he has worked with wonderful assiduity and success.  In “The Warden,” in “Barchester Towers,” are studies of clerical character for which this writer has won a special reputation.  “The Small House at Allington” is a love story of particular fascination.  Few writers have described the manifestations of love in the acts and thoughts of a modest, sweet girl as delicately as Mr. Trollope has done in the case of the deserted Lily.  Her rejection of a second suitor is felt by the reader to be the inevitable consequence of so pure a passion, and the treachery of Crosbie is traced through its various gradations with true fidelity to nature.  “Phineas Finn” is an excellent example of a parliamentary novel.  That work and its companions, “Phineas Redux,” “The Prime Minister,” and “The Duke’s Children,” keep up our acquaintance with the family and connections of Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, than which few groups of fictitious characters are more continuously interesting.  Mr. Trollope’s novels will have a special value for the future student of English social life in the nineteenth century.  The race-course, the hunting field, the country seat, Piccadilly, Hyde Park, the life of clubs and parliament, are described by him with photographic minuteness.  And the novel-reader of to-day derives a constant pleasure from his books, notwithstanding the fact that the monotony of modern life is somewhat too closely reflected in them.

The works of no writer in the English language, except those of Scott, have attained so immediate a reputation and have won so wide-spread a popularity as the novels of Charles Dickens.  “In less than six months from the appearance of the first number of the ‘Pickwick Papers,’” said the London Quarterly Review in 1837, “the whole reading public were talking about them, the names of Winkle, Warden, Weller, Snodgrass, Dodson and Fogg, had become familiar in our mouths as household terms; and Mr. Dickens was the grand object of interest to the whole tribe of ‘Leo-hunters,’ male and female, of the metropolis.  Nay, Pickwick chintzes figured in linen-drapers’ windows, and Weller corduroys