the same mood, who never hesitated an instant for a word, and who never failed to seize the word he wanted.  This ease and mastery over speech was the fruit of prodigious practice and industry both in office work and in literary work.  It is a mastery which conceals itself, and appears to the reader the easiest thing in the world.  How few out of many millions have studied that subtle mechanism of ear and thought which created the melodious ripple of these fluent and pellucid words.

His work has one special quality that has not been sufficiently noticed.  It has the most wonderful unity of texture and a perfect harmony of tone.  From the first line to the last, there is never a sentence or a passage which strikes a discordant note; we are never worried by a spasmodic phrase, nor bored by fine writing that fails to “come off.”  Nor is there ever a paragraph which we need to read over again, or a phrase that looks obscure, artificial, or enigmatic.  This can hardly be said of any other novelist of this century, except of Jane Austen, for even Thackeray himself is now and then artificial in Esmond, and the vulgarity of Yellowplush at last becomes fatiguing.  Now Trollope reproduces for us that simplicity, unity, and ease of Jane Austen, whose facile grace flows on like the sprightly talk of a charming woman, mistress of herself and sure of her hearers.  This uniform ease, of course, goes with the absence of all the greatest qualities of style; absence of any passion, poetry, mystery, or subtlety.  He never rises, it is true, to the level of the great masters of language.  But, for the ordinary incidents of life amongst well-bred and well-to-do men and women of the world, the form of Trollope’s tales is almost as well adapted as the form of Jane Austen.

In absolute realism of spoken words Trollope has hardly any equal.  His characters utter quite literally the same words, and no more, that such persons utter in actual life.  The characters, it is true, are the average men and women we meet in the educated world, and the situations, motives, and feelings described are seldom above or below the ordinary incidents of modern life.  But within this very limited range of incident, and for this very common average of person and character, the conversations are photographic or stenographic reproductions of actual speech.  His letters, especially his young ladies’ letters, are singularly real, life-like, and characteristic.  We have long got rid of the artificial eloquence and the studied witticisms of the older school.  Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Scott put into the mouths of their heroes and heroines elaborate speeches, poetry, eloquence, and epigrams which are no more like real speech than the allocutions of kings and queens in Shakespeare are like natural talk.  That has long been discarded.  Jane Austen and Thackeray make their men and women discourse as men and women do.  But perhaps with Thackeray, the talk is too racy, too brilliant, too rich with wit, humour, and character, to be quite literally truthful.  Now, Trollope, taking a far lower and simpler line, makes his characters talk with literal truth to nature.