There is a great deal of charming conversation, which is not as well known as it should be, in the best novels of Anthony Trollope. He gives his characters plenty of time and opportunity to talk, without forcing them into arbitrary channels; and occasionally, as with Mrs. Proudie and Archdeacon Grantly, and Lady Glencora, he persuades them to let us know exactly what kind of people they are. Above all, there is such an air of veracity about his causeries that the most skeptical reader listens to them without a shadow of doubt. Who can ever forget Bertie Stanhope intimating to Bishop Proudie that he had once thought of being a prelate himself, or Lady Glencora’s midnight confidences to Alice, or that crucial contest between Dr. Tempest and Mrs. Proudie! What pleasant wrangling goes on in Mrs. Dobbs Broughton’s room over the memorable picture of Jael, when Dalrymple desires his model to lean forward, throwing her weight on the nail, and Miss Van Siever not unnaturally suggests that such an action would probably have awakened Sisera before the murder was done! It all seems idle enough—this careless, lively talk—but is by no means purposeless. Life is built up of such moments, and if we are to live with the people in books, it must be through little confidences on their parts and sympathy on ours; it must be through unconscious confidences on their parts and unrestricted sympathy on ours. Now, if a novelist permits his characters to talk at us, the charm of unconsciousness is gone. If we feel for a moment they are uttering his sentiments for our approval or conversion, we cease to sympathize because we cease to believe. There is a clever and suspiciously opportune conversation in _David Grieve_ between that sorely tried hero and an intelligent workingwoman in the Champs Elysées upon the relative merits of l’Union Légale and l’Union Libre. It is, of course, a highly dispassionate discussion, intended as an appeal to reason and not to conscience; therefore the old-fashioned arguments of right and wrong, God and the Church, are carefully omitted. It fits in neatly with David’s experiences, and places the whole matter in a singularly lucid light before the reader’s eyes. Its one serious drawback is that we can never persuade ourselves to believe that it ever took place. The Frenchwoman is brought so suddenly up to the mark; she says so plainly that which Mrs. Humphry Ward thinks she ought to say; she is so charmingly unprejudiced and convincing, that we lose all faith in her before she has spoken a dozen words. The correctness of her views counts for nothing. “When we leave out what we don’t like, we can demonstrate most things,” says the late Rector of Lincoln; and it is at least doubtful whether men and women ever live virtuous lives on the strength of an argument. Lady Bertram, of _Mansfield Park_, remarking placidly from her sofa, “Do not act anything improper, my dears; Sir Thomas would not like it,” may not exert a