been given to what he calls the 'dangerous mental practice' of castle-building. He solaced his loneliness by carrying on imaginary stories, of which he was himself the hero, and which he characteristically kept within the limits of possibility. He could not fancy himself handsome, or a philosopher by any stretch of mind, but he could imagine himself to be clever and chivalrous enough to be attractive to beautiful young women. This suggested that in his mind, as in his mother's, there was a mine of literary material, and he resolved that novel-writing was the one career open to him. Accordingly he set to work in a thoroughly business-like spirit, and slowly and doggedly forced himself upon publishers.
'Nobody but a fool,' says the great Johnson, 'ever wrote except for money.' Trollope holds at least that the love of money is a perfectly honourable and sufficient reason for writing. 'We know,' he says, 'that the more a man earns the more useful he is to his fellowmen'—a fine sweeping maxim, which certainly has its convenience. It is true, he declares, of lawyers and doctors, and would be true of clergymen if (which is a rather large assumption) the best men were always made bishops. It is equally true of authors.
