With all his artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took a very modest estimate of his own powers.  I remember a characteristic discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] “Why!” said Anthony, “I sit down every morning at 5.30 with my watch on my desk, and for three hours I regularly produce 250 words every quarter of an hour.”  George Eliot positively quivered with horror at the thought—­she who could write only when she felt in the vein, who wrote, re-wrote, and destroyed her manuscript two or three times, and as often as not sat at her table without writing at all.  “There are days and days together,” she groaned out, “when I cannot write a line.”  “Yes!” said Trollope, “with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it’s a sheer matter of industry.  It’s not the head that does it—­it’s the cobbler’s wax on the seat and the sticking to my chair!” In his Autobiography he has elaborately explained this process—­how he wrote day by day, including Sundays, whatever his duties, his amusements, or the place; measuring out every page, counting the words, and exacting the given quantity hour by hour.  He wrote continuously 2500 words in each day, and at times more than 25,000 words in a week.  He wrote whilst engaged in severe professional drudgery, whilst hunting thrice a week, and in the whirl of London society.  He wrote in railway trains, on a sea voyage, and in a town club room.  Whether he was on a journey, or pressed with office reports, or visiting friends, he wrote just the same. Dr. Thorne was written whilst he was very sea-sick in a gale at sea, or was negotiating a treaty with Nubar Pasha; and the day after finishing Dr. Thorne he began The Bertrams.  It is one of the most amazing, and one of the most comical, records of literary activity we have.  No one can suppose that work of a very high class can be so produced at all.  Nor does Trollope pretend that it is of a high class.  He says it is honest work, the best he could do.

He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary productiveness.  He poses as the champion of the age in quantity and rapidity.  This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or three weeks; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three volumes each in a year.  He gives us an exact list of sixty works produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about 70,000 pounds as the earnings of some twenty-four years.  He insists that he never neglected his Post-Office work, but was an invaluable and energetic public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists that he could have done no better work if he had written much less, or if he had given more time to each book.  In all this he does not convince us.  He certainly showed transcendent force of