whist playing, his loud talk, his burly ubiquity and irrepressible energy in everything—­formed one of the marvels of the last generation.  And that such a colossus of blood and bone should spend his mornings, before we were out of bed, in analysing the hypersensitive conscience of an archdeacon, the secret confidences whispered between a prudent mamma and a love-lorn young lady, or the subtle meanderings of Marie Goesler’s heart—­this was a real psychologic problem.

There can be no doubt that this constitutional vehemence of his, this hypertrophy of blood and muscle, injured his work and dimmed his reputation.  Much of his work he ought to have burnt.  His classical studies are worthless, his Life of Thackeray and his Travels are mere book-making.  His novels, even the best, are revised and printed with scandalous haste.  He speaks of a “toga virile” and of “the husband of his bosom,” for wife; and there are misprints in every paragraph.  When, in his Autobiography, he let the public into the story of his method, of his mechanical writing so many words per hour, of his beginning a new tale the day after he finished the last, of his having no particular plot, and hardly thinking about a plot, and all the little trade secrets of his factory, the public felt some disgust and was almost inclined to think it had been cheated out of its 70,000 pounds.

Anthony Trollope was not a fraud, nor even a mere tradesman.  His reputation may perhaps partially revive, and some of his best work may be read in the next century.  His best work will of course be a mere residuum of his sixty books, as is the best of nearly all prolific writers.  I am inclined to think the permanent survival may be limited to the Barchester cycle, with Orley Farm and the two Phineas Finns.  In any case, his books will hereafter bear a certain historical interest, as the best record of actual manners in the higher English society between 1855 and 1875.  That value nothing can take away, however dull, connu, and out of date the books may now seem to our new youth.  It is a curious problem why our new youth persists in filling its stomach with the poorest trash that is “new”—­i.e. published in 1895, whilst it will not look at a book that is “old “—­i.e. published in 1865, though both are equally unknown to the young reader.  If our new youth ever could bring itself to take up a book having 1865 on its title-page, it might find in the best of Anthony Trollope much subtle observation, many manly and womanly natures, unfailing purity of tone, and wholesome enjoyment.

[1] This anecdote has been doubted, on the ground that such rapid composition is impossible.  But Trollope in his Autobiography asserts this fact, exactly as he told George Eliot, except that the first half hour was occupied by re-reading the work of the previous day.  The average morning’s work was thus 2500 words, written in two and a half hours.