Trollope is equally successful with some other social problems and characters of unstable equilibrium.  They are none of them very profound or exalted studies in psychology; but they are truthful, natural, and ingenious; and it needed a sure and delicate hand to make them interesting and life-like.  The feeble, solemn, timid, vacillating bishop, driven to distraction by some clerical scandal in his tea-cup of a diocese; the pompous ecclesiastic with wounded dignity and family quarrels; the over-sensitive priest whose conscience is more acute than his brain; the weak, generous, cowardly owner of an embarrassed estate; the honest and impulsive youth placed between love and duty; the loving girl who will not sacrifice dignity to love; the public official who is torn between conscience and self-interest; the man in a great position who does not know his own mind; the man with honest principles who is tempted above his strength by love, ambition, or ruin—­all of these live in the pages of Trollope with perfect truth to nature and reality of movement.  It would be too much to say that any of them are masterly creations, unless it be Crawley and the Proudies, but they are absolutely truthful, real, living portraits.  The situations are not very striking, but then they are perfectly natural.  And the characters never say or do a thing which oversteps by a hair’s-breadth the probable and natural conduct of such persons.

All this is now said to be commonplace, goody-goody, and Philistine.  There are no female acrobats, burglars, gutter-urchins, crapulous prostitutes, no pathological anatomy of diseased bodies and carious souls, hardly a single case of adultery in all Trollope.  But they who can exist without these stimulants may find pleasant reading yet in his best work. The Last Chronicle of Barset is a really good tale which deserves to live, and the whole Crawley episode rises to the level of fine imaginative work. Doctor Thorne is a sound, pleasant, ingenious story from beginning to end.  It has perhaps the best plot of all Trollope’s books, and, singularly enough, it is the only plot which he admits not to be his own.  I count Mary Thorne as his best woman and Doctor Thorne as one of his best men.  The unity of Doctor Thorne is very striking and ingenious.  The stage is crowded:  there are nearly a score of well-marked characters and five distinct households; but the whole series works into the same plot; the scene is constantly varied, and yet there is no double plot or separate companies.  Thus, though the whole story revolves round the fortunes of a single family, the interest and the movement never flag for a page.  The machinery is very simple; the characters are of average strength and merit; the incidents and issues are ordinary enough.  And the general effect is wholesome, manly, womanly, refined, and true to nature.