from bishops or headmasters, or from the average adult male of the upper classes. Archdeacon Grantly is certainly an excellent and lifelike person: an honourable, narrow-minded English gentleman with just the necessary tinge of ecclesiastical dignity. Still, if our hypothetical descendants asked us, Were English archdeacons like that? we should be a little puzzled. If Miss Yonge could be called as a witness to character, she would certainly remonstrate. Archdeacons, she would say, in her time, high-church archdeacons at least, were generally saints. They could be spiritual guides; they had listened to Newman or been misled by Essays and Reviews; but they had, at least, been interested in the religious movements of the day. Trollope's archdeacon is as indifferent to all such matters as were the much-reviled dignitaries of an older generation. He is supposed to do his official duties, and he carefully says, 'Good Heavens!' where a layman would use another phrase; but he never gives the slightest indication of having any religious views whatever beyond a dislike to dissenters. He has a landed estate, and is as zealous as any squire to keep up the breed of foxes, and he threatens to disinherit his son for making an unworldly
