They haven't a thought beyond housekeeping or making a respectable marriage. We could hardly expect such delineations of the fair feminine qualities as could be given by feminine novelists alone. We could not ask him for a Jane Eyre or still less for a Maggie Tulliver. But were the average girls of forty years back made of such very solid flesh and blood with so small an allowance of the romantic? His are so good-natured, sensible, and commonplace that he has the greatest difficulty in preventing them from at once marrying their lovers. He has to make them excessively punctilious on some point of their little code of propriety. One is loved by a lord, whose mother objects to a mésalliance; another is of doubtful legitimacy, and a third is the daughter of an excellent man whose character is for a moment under a cloud. They have to hold out till their lovers and their lovers' families have got over such scruples, or the cause has been removed. The most popular of all was Miss Lily Dale, whom Trollope himself unkindly describes as somewhat of a feminine prig. She will not marry the man whom she loves because she has been cruelly jilted by a thorough snob, and makes it a point of honour not to accept consolation or
