was perhaps due in part to his conviction that John Bull was a huge mass of solid flesh incapable of entering the more ethereal regions of subtle fancy of which he was himself a native. Trollope was to him a John Bull convicting himself out of his own mouth, and yet a good fellow in his place. When our posterity sits in judgment, it will discover, I hope, that the conventional John Bull is only an embodiment of one set of the national qualities, and by no means an exhaustive portrait of the original. But taking Trollope to represent the point of view from which there is a certain truthfulness in the picture—and no novelist can really do more than give one set of impressions—posterity may after all consider his novels as a very instructive document. Perhaps, though it would be idle to prophesy confidently, one remark will be suggested. The middle of the nineteenth century—our descendants may possibly say—was really a time in which a great intellectual, political, and social revolution was beginning to make itself perceptible. The vast changes now (that is, in the twenty-first century) so familiar to everybody could then have been foretold by any intelligent observer. And yet in this ancient novelist we see the society of the time, the squires and parsons
