lungs might be unable to get his fair share in the discussion; but not because Trollope was intentionally overbearing, or even rough. His kindliness and cordiality were as unmistakable as his sincerity; and if he happened to impinge upon his hearers' sore points, it was from clumsiness, not malignity. He was incapable of shyness or diffidence, and would go at any subject as gallantly as he rode at a stiff fence in the hunting-field. His audacity sprang not from conceit, but from a little over-confidence in the power of downright common-sense.
Here is the problem to which I referred. If we inquired how such a character had been developed, the last hypothesis which we should make would be that it was due to such surroundings as are described in the Autobiography. If one wished to bring up a lad to be a sneak, a cynic, and a humbug, one would deal with him as Trollope was dealt with in his childhood. Many distinguished men have preserved painful impressions of their school-days. Thackeray has sufficiently indicated what he thought of the morality of a public school in his day. Dickens felt bitterly to the end of his life the neglect from which he suffered during part of his childhood. Trollope
