But we conservatives of an older school are grateful to Anthony that he produced for the last generation an immense collection of pleasant tales without a single foul spot or unclean incident.  It was his boast that he had never written a line which a pure woman could not read without a blush.  This is no doubt one of the grounds on which he is so often denounced as passe.  His tales, of course, are full of love, and the love is not always discreet or virtuous.  There are cases of guilty love, of mad love, of ungoverned and unreasoning passion.  But there is not an impure or prurient passage in the whole library of tales.  Much more than this:  in the centre of almost every tale, we are taken to the heart of a spotless, loving, refined, brave English girl.  In nothing does Anthony Trollope delight more than when he unveils to us the secret thoughts of a noble-hearted maiden who loves strongly but who has a spirit as strong as her love, a clear brain and a pure will.  In nothing is he more successful; nowhere is he more subtle, more true, more interesting.  In this fine gift, he surpasses all his contemporaries, and almost all other English novelists.  Mary Thorne, Lily Dale, Lucy Roberts—­I would almost add, Martha Dunstable—­may not be heroines of romance, and are certainly not great creations.  But they are pure, right-minded, delicate, brave women; and it does one good to be admitted to the sacred confessional of their hearts.

It must be admitted that they are “young ladies,” nurtured in the conventional refinement of the last generation, high-bred, and trained in the jealous sensitiveness of what was thought to be “maiden modesty” thirty or forty years ago.  That is their misfortune to-day; it is now rather silly to be a “young lady” at all, and the old-fashioned “maiden modesty” of their mothers and grandmothers is become positively ridiculous.  Young women of the present date, we are assured in the language of our gilded youth, have to be either “jolly girls” or “crocks”; and Mary Thorne and Lily Dale are certainly not “jolly girls.”  Their trials and agonies are not different from those which may happen in any ordinary family, and the problems they have to solve are those which may await any girl at any time.  But the subtle touches with which we are admitted to their meditations, the delicate weighing of competing counsels and motives, the living pulses of heart and brain, and the essential soundness and reality of the mental and moral crisis—­are all told with an art that may be beneath that of Jane Austen, but which certainly is akin to hers, and has the same quality of pure and simple human nature.  Pure and simple human nature is, for the moment, out of fashion as the subject of modern romance.  But it remains a curious problem how the boisterous, brawny, thick-skinned lump of manhood whom we knew as Anthony Trollope ever came to conceive so many delicate and sensitive country maidens, and to see so deeply and so truly into the heart of their maiden meditations.