must be false. When we read the lives of people we have known and observe the singular transformations which take place, we are sometimes tempted to think that biography is an organised attempt to misrepresent the past. Trollope is at least conscientiously labouring to avoid that error with a zeal which few Boswells can rival. His fiction is in that respect even truer than history. Hawthorne said at an early period that Trollope's novels precisely suited his taste. They are 'solid, substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.' Trollope was delighted, as he well might be, with such praise from so different a writer, and declares that this passage defined the aim of his novels 'with wonderful accuracy.' They represent, that is, the average English society of the time more faithfully even than memoirs of real persons, because there is no motive for colouring the motives of an imaginary person.
Is this really the case? Will our descendants get an accurate conception of England in the
