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so far from evolutionary law as to result in the acquisition of an unneeded' faculty. When a man of genius formulates a system of theology in poetry, the poetry is apt to survive the theology; 'Paradise Lost' is an instance in point, and 'The Dynasts' is not likely to prove an exception. But I do not care to imagine a time when Englishmen will not read this poem with delight, and value it among their great possessions; nor do I believe that there will be wanting a succession of younger adventurers to set sail for the El Dorado from which Mr Hardy has brought back so rich a treasure. It is likely enough that in the present state of this celestial commerce they will be little honoured and poorly enough paid for the cargoes which they distribute to their fellow-citizens; but they will remember that it is the distribution and not the price that is important.

A great nation cannot spiritually subsist upon its present, any more than it can materially subsist upon its past; we may be sure of its decadence from the moment when it can no longer draw nourishment from its own history. It is right then to be dissatisfied with an unmixed diet of shorter poems; it would be unhealthy to live entirely on the more instinctive emotions. The feelings of the day or the hour may be noble feelings, and find expression in a splendid lyric poetry; but for the comprehensive and invigorating survey of the past a more sustained effort and a more impressive form are needed. It is a great thing that we should have a school of historians-historians who are more than collectors of dry bones for the museums of the future-but it is not enough. All true history is Toinois; but there are thoughts and feelings about the past which take a wider range, and call for a more penetrating and more memorable expression than prose can give them. It is for these that Mr Hardy has planned a new departure in English poetry.

HENRY NEWBOLT.

Vol. 210.-No. 418.

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Art. 11.-THE WORKS OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE.

1. The Barsetshire Novels-The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857), Dr Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867);-The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848), The Bertrams (1859), Orley Farm (1862), Can You Forgive Her? (1864); and other works.

2. The Barsetshire Novels.

London: Bell, 1906.

New edition. Eight vols.

3. The Golden Lion of Granpère (1872), The American Senator (1877), Marion Fay (1882), The Land-Leaguers (1883); and other works. New editions. London: Chatto and Windus, 1885-99.

4. The Barsetshire Novels, and other stories. New editions. London: John Lane, 1901-7.

5. The Barsetshire Novels. Illustrated edition (in progress). London: Routledge, 1908

6. An Autobiography. By Anthony Trollope. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1883.

LITTLE more than a quarter of a century has elapsed since one of the most prolific, as he was certainly the most methodical (some might even say mechanical) novelist of the Victorian age finally laid down his pen. Anthony Trollope, in his own words, lived so long and so intimately with his characters, he put so much of himself into all his writings, that he always believed in their vitality. On the whole his anticipations have been justified by the result. The twenty-sixth year after his death had not expired before two popular reprints of his bestknown stories began to issue from the press-those published respectively by Mr John Lane and Messrs Bell. Before this his two latest and least-known fictions, 'The Way we Live Now,' and 'He Knew He was Right,' had been reproduced by Messrs Chatto and Windus. And now follows an illustrated edition of the Barsetshire series by Messrs Routledge. It would therefore seem that there still exists a real and more or less general demand for Trollope's works among the classes of readers which have sprung up since he wrote. Whether he will share the immortality of his great contemporaries, Dickens and Thackeray, time must show. It is enough

here to observe that the recent cheap issues of his books are evidence of his continued popularity and fame.

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The bibliography of Trollope is a little confusing, because some of his novels, especially the later ones, first appeared irregularly in magazines or in monthly parts, and because there were sometimes long intervals between their serial publication and their eventual production in book form. It would occasionally happen that works commissioned by one publisher were, through some difference with an editor, actually published by another house. Thus the last instalment of Mr Lane's neatlyexecuted reprints, Rachel Ray,' was originally written for Good Words.' The editor, Norman Macleod, on reading the manuscript, thought it too uncomplimentary to the Evangelicals; and other arrangements had to be made. This was not the only case in which it might have been said of Trollope, habent sua fata libelli.' Another novel of the late sixties, The Vicar of Bullhampton,' had been written for 'Once a Week,' a magazine then belonging to Messrs Bradbury and Evans. The opening portion was to have appeared in July 1869. About the end of March the proprietors made an appeal particularly vexatious to a man of Trollope's temperament; they asked him to let them postpone its publication. They had, in fact, bought the right of translating and producing Victor Hugo's novel, L'Homme qui rit,' and had counted on running it through their periodical before Trollope's novel was due. As things fell out, by some delay on Hugo's part, or confusion on that of his publishers, the French novel would have had to appear in the magazine at the same time as the Vicar of Bullhampton.' The editor of 'Once a Week' hoped Trollope would allow his fiction to be transferred to the Gentleman's Magazine.' The English novelist, not unintelligibly, refused; the delay of the French author's work proved to be out of the question. The Vicar of Bullhampton,' therefore, was first produced in monthly parts, and afterwards, by the same publishers, in two volumes. Other details of a like character concerning Trollope's still later works will be more conveniently noticed hereafter.

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Meanwhile, we have something to say of the personal conditions under which this indefatigable producer of so much readable matter came to be a writer of books at

all, as well as of the slow and laborious process by which at length he permanently secured the public ear. 'My Irish apprenticeship as a post-office surveyor's clerk showed me, at the age of twenty-six, two things-first, that I could sit a horse across country; secondly, that I had it in me to write a novel.' So, in his later years, Anthony Trollope was fond of telling his friends. The remark is a true piece of autobiography, and indicates in a single sentence the two pursuits which gave him most enjoyment throughout his long and active life. Benjamin Disraeli, adapting, perhaps unconsciously, a sentiment of Charles Fox, used to describe himself as a very painstaking man who, though he tried many things, and often failed at first, frequently succeeded in the end. Trollope's performances in the saddle were preceded by scarcely fewer failures than his achievements with the pen.

At no time, however, did he touch anything without turning it into capital of some sort or other. If he were not always a literary artist, he was from the first a born and an unfailing manufacturer of 'copy.' No experience, however slight or ancient, no hint supplied by conversation or by the incidents of daily life, was ever lost. Sooner or later everything that had happened to him, everything he had heard or seen, was reproduced in readable form by the literary machine into which he had converted himself. Stout old Anthony' he was called when his elder brother, Thomas Adolphus Trollope -not to mention his house and form masters-was bullying him at Winchester. This stoutness and sturdiness enabled him afterwards, as a Harrow day-boy, to take his floggings and kickings, as Thackeray has said is the British schoolboy's manner, sullenly and in silence.' It was the same after he exchanged a miserable existence at the school on the Hill' for a petty clerkship at the General Post-office. From that position, reached in 1834, according to his own account, dismissal for incapacity was only prevented by a transfer to a local post-office in Galway. That change made him at once a man, a sportsman, and a novelist.

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The scene of his first work of fiction, 'The Macdermots of Ballycloran' (1847), was laid in Galway, which he had then got to know as well as he knew afterwards every corner in the Essex that was his home, or in the Wilt

shire where he found Barset, its cathedral, its canons and its bishop. The Irish novels coming subsequently from his pen, 'The Kellys and the O'Kellys,' and 'Castle Richmond,' had little about them distinctively Irish. But his earliest attempt in fiction of any sort, 'The Macdermots of Ballycloran,' is from beginning to end racy of the soil. It is more than that; it is at once a genuinely Irish story, and contains in the heroine an allegorical personification of Ireland herself.

About the time when Trollope gave himself to this task, his contemporary in letters, afterwards his closest friend in private life, Charles Lever, was illustrating, from a different point of view, the lighter characteristics of his countrymen in the first of his novels, 'Harry Lorrequer.' Whatever serious moral may be drawn from Lever's Irish romances, they go to prove that in war, as he showed afterwards to be the case in diplomacy, if not in other undertakings, Irishmen seldom fail to do well out of their own country. The same conclusion, at a much later date, was indicated by the historian Froude in his romance, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy' (1889). Anthony Trollope equally lacked Froude's Hibernian pessimism and Lever's animal spirits. His early failures and rebuffs, following a joyless boyhood, left their abiding mark upon him in a tendency to pensive depression. The episode of the girl whom he designed for a symbol of her nationality, her English lover, and the tragedy in which the whole incident ends, were the congenial product of a melancholy mood; they are wanting in neither force nor pathos. Trollope's post-office work in Galway brought him into close touch with every variety of the national life; and it revealed to him the mutual incompatibility between Irish character and English administration. For Feemy's English lover, Govery, personifies the contrast between the unsympathetic rigidity of Anglo-Saxon officialism and the spasmodic aspirations and incalculable impulsiveness of the Celt.

Other writers, apart from Froude in 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy,' have reflected a nation's problems or temper in the efforts or embarrassments of an individual. Six years after the publication of The Macdermots,' Bulwer Lytton, in the successful ventures of Pisistratus Caxton at the antipodes and his retrieval of the family fortunes

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