His range was not wide, for he could not present either grand characters or tragical situations, any more than he could break out into the splendid humour of Dickens. His wings never raised him far above the level floor of earth. But within that limited range he had surprising fertility. His clerical portrait-gallery is the most complete that any English novelist has given us. No two faces are exactly alike, and yet all are such people as one might see any day in the pulpit. So, again, there is scarcely one of his stories in which a young lady is not engaged, formally or practically, to two men at the same time, or one man more or less committed to two women; yet no story repeats exactly the situation, or raises the problem of honour and duty in quite the same form as it appears in the stories that went before. Few people who have written so much have so little appeared to be exhausting their invention. It must, however, be admitted that Trollope's fame might have stood higher if he had written less. The public which had been delighted with his earlier groups of novels, and especially with that group in which _The Warden_ comes first and _Barchester Towers_ second, began latterly to tire of what they had come to deem the mannerisms of their favourite, and felt that they now knew the compass of his gifts. Partly, perhaps, because he feared to be always too like himself, he once or twice attempted to represent more improbable situations and exceptional personages. But the attempt was not successful. He lost his touch of ordinary life without getting into any higher region of poetical truth; and in his latest stories he had begun to return to his earlier and better manner.