His insight into parliamentary life was surprisingly accurate and deep.  He had not the genius of Disraeli, but his pictures are utterly free from caricature or distortion of any kind.  In his photographic portraiture of the British Parliament he surpassed all his contemporaries; and inasmuch as such studies can only have a local and sectional interest, they have probably injured his popularity and his art.  His conduct of legal intricacies and the ways of lawyers is singularly correct; and the long and elaborate trial scene in Phineas Redux is a masterpiece of natural and faithful descriptions of an Old Bailey criminal trial in which “society” happens to be involved.  Yet of courts of law, as of bishops’ palaces, rectory firesides, the lobbies of Parliament, and ducal “house parties,” Trollope could have known almost nothing except as an occasional and outside observer.  The life of London clubs, the habits and personnel of a public office, the hunting-field, and the social hierarchy and ten commandments observed in a country town—­these things Trollope knew to the minutest shade, and he has described them with wonderful truth and zest.

There was a truly pathetic drollery in his violent passion for certain enjoyments—­hunting, whist, and the smoking-room of his club.  I cannot forget the comical rage which he felt at Professor Freeman’s attack on fox-hunting.  I am not a sporting man myself; and, though I may look on fox-hunting as one of the less deadly sins involved in “sport,” I know nothing about it.  But it chanced that as a young man I had been charged with the duty of escorting a certain young lady to a “meet” of fox-hounds in Essex.  A fox was found; but what happened I hardly remember; save this, that, in the middle of a hot burst, I found myself alongside of Anthony Trollope, who was shouting and roaring out “What!—­what are you doing here?” And he was never tired of holding me up to the scorn of the “Universe” club as a deserter from the principles of Professor Freeman and John Morley.  I had taken no part in the controversy, but it gave him huge delight to have detected such backsliding in one of the school he detested.  Like other sporting men who imagine that their love of “sport” is a love of nature, when it is merely a pleasure in physical exercise, Trollope cared little for the poetic aspect of nature.  His books, like Thackeray’s, hardly contain a single fine picture of the country, of the sea, of mountains, or of rivers.  Compared with Fielding, Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot, he is a man blind to the loveliness of nature.  To him, as to other fox-hunters, the country was good or bad as it promised or did not promise a good “run.”  Though Trollope was a great traveller, he rarely uses his experiences in a novel, whereas Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, George Eliot fill their pages with foreign adventures and scenes of travel.  His hard riding as an overgrown heavy-weight, his systematic