resist to the last any attempt to dismember the Empire. He BOUNDERLEY AND THE UNION! BOUNDERLEY AND PURE BEER! The Liberals, The contest was short, sharp, and decisive. stunned by this sudden thunderbolt, could not find a candidate. The Social Democrats, in back parlour assembled, ran a crystalsouled enthusiast who polled six votes, and was shortly afterwards convicted of cheating the Metropolitan Railway Company out of a threepenny fare. Barrington-Bounderley was returned triumphantly. Lord Salisbury sent him a telegram of congratulation; and the Constitutional cause was saved. Since that memorable day the seat has not been challenged; and it is but bare justice to say that our Member works hard to keep it. His life is one long public meeting. He never leaves a letter unanswered. He subscribes to every benevolent object. Though, as an enemy discovered, he deals at the Stores, he has stated in a public address that (like General Goldsworthy) he employs 'thirty-three local tradesmen.' He toils like a galley-slave to get his constituents into the gallery of the House of Commons, and he gives their wives strawberries and tea on the terrace. At Christmas each of us receives a triptych of white and gold, which, being opened, discloses Mr. and Mrs. Barrington-Bounderley simpering at one another across a Union Jack. Mrs. Barrington-Bounderley's Crêche, Mrs. Barrington Bounderley's Innocuous Sweets-Shop, Mrs. Barrington-Bounderley's School of Popular Calisthenics, Mrs. Barrington-Bounderley's Ladies' Association for Reforming Workhouse Bonnets, are among the most valued and most popular institutions, not only of our parish, but of our borough. She has been presented at Court by the wife of a Cabinet Minister. She has written her name at Marlborough House, and bounded over the green sward of Buckingham Palace. Her neat little victoria (though horsed from the livery-yard in Stucco Mews West) has quite eclipsed that archaic landau which-for carriage-painters are expensive-still bears the arms of the late Lord Farringford; and her evening parties, graced by Taper, Tadpole, Mrs. Ranville-Ranville, and the Stiltstalkings, are voted by the frivolous an improvement on Mrs. Soulsby's Thursday afternoons. ANTHONY TROLLOPE. AFTER a year of public excitement, when one's interest and sympathy have gone with the straining energies of the country, now, while still large thoughts of destiny bear on one's mind and great issues still are toward, some gentle refreshment is necessary, and it is pleasant to contemplate the social English as they were in a quiet time, not our own, but not unfamiliarly remote. Consequently I have betaken myself to Anthony Trollope, an old and constant friend, and for months at a time almost my only reading in fiction. There was an essay in a magazine about him some time ago which I read with surprise and indignation. It had a Good Samaritan air towards a neglected unfortunate. It picked Anthony Trollope up, so to speak, and, having brushed him down, called the attention of passers-by to the fact that in spite of many unlucky deficiencies he was not altogether an unpresentable object. It is the recollection of that essay that moves me to hazard one on my own account. I was surprised. That Anthony Trollope should be neglected by the great mass of readers was likely enough. He was popular in his own day, because people recognised in him the accurate picture of their human and other surroundings. But few people care about accurate pictures of their fathers' surroundings, and his other qualities are not those which command popular success. His plots are not startling, and his language is quiet and unpretentious. But that a writer who had made a study of him should think him an object for affable encouragement was remarkable. I imagine that few students of fiction and few students of social history have not a better appreciation of his excellence and value. To begin with his value for the history of manners, he is by far our greatest realist since Fielding. Miss Austen uniformly approaches him in her own field, but that field was a very much smaller one than his. George Eliot approaches him in some passages of some of her books, but in the rest she is in no way his competitor. Lovers of Dickens are apt to attribute to that great master of sentiment and caricature the perfection of every conceivable quality; but I hardly think the well-advised of them would claim for him a literally exact portraiture of manners; and A it is in that sense I am speaking of realism, putting any esoteric views there may be about a higher realism on one side. comparison with Thackeray may perhaps help my estimate. Thackeray was by far Trollope's superior in the perception of the humours of life and in a humorous presentation of them, but in fidelity to the facts of life, or at least the facts which eye and ear tell one finally, he was by far Trollope's inferior. Thackeray would seize on a mode of eccentricity and exploit it to its full value, but even in this he would exaggerate for effect. Fred Bayham and Paul de Florac would be all the better for a little less exuberance. With commonplace people and incidents he was careless. Even when moralising in his own person, he could write, to take a trivial but conclusive instance, of a gentleman bawling out the odds he would give or take' on a racecourse. But you are defied to find in Trollope a remark or an action out of keeping with the character concerned. I would give a pound for every such instance found by an objector, if he would give me a penny for every strictly consistent speech or instance I might find in return. One might go further than the mere details of speech and action, and compare these authors when they are dealing with the same significant situation in social or domestic life. An instance is the treatment of an unhappy marriage in 'The Newcomes' and in The Claverings.' Both Sir Barnes Newcome and Sir Hugh Clavering were hard and selfish men who misused their wives. And when due allowance has been made for the fact that Barnes Newcome was a cad and Hugh Clavering a gentleman, which is the more characteristic and the truer picture : Barnes Newcome swearing at his wife before servants and flinging sarcasms at her about nothing, or Hugh Clavering instinctively chilling his wife's affection with persistent and unstudied indifference and curt reasonableness? I have no doubt which of these ménages is the more human and interesting; the Newcome one is empty violence, and, as it were, abstract evil, and the Clavering a subtle exposure of conflicting temperaments. But on the point of realism only, remembering that Barnes was a snob, a slave to convention, and had married' above him,' we must surely pronounce that his violence and causeless cruelty are exaggerated; while Sir Hugh is natural throughout-merely a heartless man who was quite sure he was treating his wife fairly, and was right in chastening her sentimentality and trash and nonsense.' If it is added that all of us have met many Hugh Claverings and few 6 of us a single Barnes Newcome, it might be replied that common experience is irrelevant, that the creation of an exceptional character might be the greater feat. But surely that is only the case if the exceptional character is true to itself. If you find Barnes Newcome convincing' or 'inevitable,' or whatever the proper phrase of criticism may be, there is an end of it. But at least it is a serious question if he be so, and there can be no question about Sir Hugh. Other parallels might be given, but I dislike finding fault with Thackeray; to me it always seems a sort of domestic treachery, like abusing one's friends to strangers. Nor would it serve to make comparisons with Mr. Meredith. Characters portrayed with splendid realism he has given us, like Squire Beltham in Harry Richmond,' far and away greater in profundity and effect than anything in Trollope. But Mr. Meredith is seldom a realist, and his general absorption in psychology forbids the discursive panorama of life we find in Thackeray and Trollope; and, after all, no number of comparisons can prove the justness of my opinion. If, however, one is content to keep to the superficialities of life only, I think that no one will dispute Trollope's absolute and minute trustworthiness. It was amply endorsed by those who could test it by experience, and we may accept it without misgiving. The aesthetic value of it, as an end in itself, varies of course with temperament. Merely to note small differences in the manners of the last generation from those of my own is to me a very great enjoyment, and the smaller, the subtler they are, so much the better. I can read carefully every word of the conversation at a dinner party in the palace at Barchester without a moment of weariness, however commonplace that conversation may have been. The little differences in modes of address, the existing point of view intellectually and morally, the social values and distances of this or that distinction in class-all this I love to ponder and carefully to compare with my memory of such commonplace conversations conducted by the present representatives of the people in the book. This, as I said, is an end in itself. But the broader and more bravely soaring minds of other people, impatient of trivialities, would not necessarily waste their time in the same relaxation. These trivialities of manner and address, these intellectual and moral points of view held by commonplace people, imply many important facts of our social system, and the subtle changes in them may connote great |