He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary productiveness. He poses as the champion of the age in quantity and rapidity. This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or three weeks; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three volumes each in a year. He gives us an exact list of sixty works produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about 70,000 pounds as the earnings of some twenty-four years. He insists that he never neglected his Post-Office work, but was an invaluable and energetic public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists that he could have done no better work if he had written much less, or if he had given more time to each book. In all this he does not convince us. He certainly showed transcendent force of will, of nerve, and of endurance. "It's dogged as does it!" says Giles Hoggett to Mr. Crawley, in _The Last Chronicle of Barset_; and if "dogged" could make a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre-eminently "dogged." But a great novelist needs other gifts. And to tell us that he would not have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if every book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within him--this is to tell us palpable nonsense. Trollope's sixty works no doubt exceed the product of any Englishman of our age; but they fall short of the product of Dumas, George Sand, and Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious. He is very often dull: or rather utterly commonplace. It is the fashion with the present generation to assert that he is never anything but commonplace; but this is the judgment of a perverted taste. His besetting danger is certainly the commonplace. It is true that he is almost never dramatic, or powerful, or original. His plots are of obvious and simple construction; his characters are neither new, nor subtle, nor powerful; and his field is strictly limited to special aspects of the higher English society in town and country. But in his very best work, he has risen above commonplace and has painted certain types of English men and women with much grace and consummate truth.