admit that she can love twice. Readers, it seems, fell in love with her, and used to write to Trollope entreating him to reconcile her to making her lover happy. Posterity, I think, will make a mistake if it infers that English girls were generally of this type; but it must admit, though with a certain wonder, that the type commended itself to a sturdy, sensible Briton of the period, as the very ideal of Womanhood, and delighted a large circle of readers.
The prosaic person, it must remember, has a faculty for ignoring all the elements of life and character which are not prosaic, and if Trollope's picture is accurate it is not exhaustive. The weakness comes from misapplying a good principle. Trollope made it a first principle to keep rigorously to the realities of life. He inferred that nothing strange or improbable should ever be admitted. That is not the way to be lifelike. Life, as we all find out, is full of the strange and improbable. Every character has its idiosyncrasies: its points of divergence from the ordinary. If the average man whose qualities are just at the mean between the extremes, who is half-way between genius and idiot, villain and saint, must be allowed to exist, it may be doubted whether he is not, on the
