The episcopal and capitular group of ecclesiastics round the Cathedral of Barchester is Trollope’s main creation, and is destined to endure for some time.  It is all in its way inimitably true and subtly graduated from bishop to dean, from dean to canon, and so on through the whole chapter down to the verger and the porter.  The relations of these dignitaries to each other, the relation of their woman-kind to each other, the relation of the clerical world to the town world and to the county world, their conventional etiquette, their jealousies, their feuds, their scandals, and their entertainments, are all marked with admirable truth and a refined touch.  The relation of the village respectabilities to the county families, the relation of the county families to the great ducal magnate, are all given with curious precision and subtle discrimination.  When The Warden appeared just forty years ago, I happened to be a pupil in the chambers of the late Sir Henry Maine, then a famous critic of the Saturday Review; and I well remember his interest and delight in welcoming a new writer, from whom he thought so much might be expected.  The relations of London “Society” to the parliamentary and ministerial world as described in Trollope’s later books are all treated with entire mastery.  It is this thorough knowledge of the organism of English society which specially distinguishes Trollope.  It is a quality in which Thackeray alone is his equal; and Thackeray himself has drawn no complex social organism with such consummate completeness as Trollope’s Barchester Close.  It is of course purely English, locally true to England only.  But it is, as Nathaniel Hawthorne said, “solid and substantial,” “as real as if it were a great lump out of the earth,”—­“just as English as a beefsteak.”

What makes all that so strange is this, that when he began to write novels, Trollope had far less experience than have most cultivated men of cathedral closes, rectories, and county families.  He had never been to a college, and till past middle life he never had access to the higher grades of English society.  He never at any time, and certainly not when the Barchester cycle began, had any footing whatever in clerical circles, and but little intimate acquaintance with young ladies of birth and refinement in country homes.  He never was much thrown with the young bloods of the army, of the universities, or of Parliament.  He rarely consorted with dukes or county magnates, and he never lived in the centre of the political world.  Yet this rough, self-taught busy Post-Office surveyor in Ireland, perpetually travelling about the country on the inspections of his duty, managed to see to the very marrow of the prelates of a cathedral, to the inner histories of the duke’s castle and the squire’s home, into the secret musings of the rector’s daughter, and into the tangled web of parliamentary intrigue.  He did all this with a perfectly sure and subtle touch, which was often, it is true, somewhat tame, and is never perhaps of any very great brilliance, but which was almost faultlessly true, never extravagant, never unreal.  And, to add to the wonder, you might meet him for an hour; and, however much you might like his bluff, hearty, resonant personality, you would have said he was the last man to have any delicate sympathy with bishops, dukes, or young ladies.