you are sure that the best of which you are capable is found.
Of course, it is quite easy for someone to object that many of the greatest masters of the past have not composed in this manner; that Fielding and Smollett, Dickens and Thackeray were notoriously loose in plot construction, and that Trollope himself acknowledges, "I have never troubled myself about the construction of plots and am not now insisting on thoroughness in a branch of work in which I myself have not been very thorough." And the objector might go a step further and ask: Did Shakespeare, when he was writing Hamlet, inscribe above his desk, "To be or not to be, that is the question," as a reminder that his theme was the tragedy of a vacillating nature; or similarly, when he wrote Othello, "A man not easily jealous but, when roused, perplexed in the extreme"; or again for Macbeth, "Vault-
