them before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel.'
This surely is sound doctrine: but Trollope is justifying one set of critics in order to answer another. He wrote best, he admits, when his mind was fullest, and freest from distraction; that is, when he had the 'inspiration' or 'rush of enthusiasm,' against which he warns his disciples. No doubt a man may write quickly at such moments. The great Goethe—if one may introduce such an august example—tells us that he was at times so eager to get his thoughts upon paper that he could not even wait to put the sheet straight, and dashed down his verses diagonally. George Eliot—to come a bit nearer to Trollope—wrote her finest part of Adam Bede without a pause or a correction. That you should write quickly when you are 'inspired' is natural; but that does not prove that all previous inspiration is superfluous. These unconscious admissions must qualify the statement about the two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. Trollope's genuine gift showed itself in that practice of 'castle building' which, as he tells us, he always kept up. His ideal architecture, it is true, was of a humble and prosaic kind. He did
