With such a basis of research it is easy to infer how authentic, as a picture of life, would be the superstructure of romantic fiction by an author adequately equipped. Accordingly, the Italian novels of Thomas Adolphus Trollope are most accurate and detailed reflections of local characteristics; they are full of special information; and, while they enlighten the novice as to the domestic economy, habits, ways of thinking, costume, and social traditions of the people, they revive, with singular freshness, to the mind of one who has sojourned in Italy, every particular of his experience,--not only the _corso_, the opera, and the carnival, but the meals, the phraseology, the household arrangements,--all that is most individual in a district, with all that is most general as nationally representative. Indeed, not a fact or trait of modern Tuscan life seems to have escaped the author's vigilant observation and patient record; the life of the effete noble, the frugal citizen, the shrewd broker, the pampered, ecclesiastic, the peasant, and the artist is revealed with the most precise and graphic detail. We are taken to the promenade and the _caffè_, to the _piazza_ and the church, to the farm-house and the _palazzo_; and there we see and hear the actual everyday intercourse of the people. The Tuscan character is drawn to the life, without exaggeration, and even in its more evanescent, as well as normal traits; its urbanity, gossip, thrift, geniality, self-indulgence, and latent courage are admirably delineated; its superior refinement, sobriety, love of show, and class peculiarities are truly given; the old feudal manners that linger in modern civilization are accounted for and illustrated, especially in the relation of dependants "occupying every shade of gradation between a common servant and a bosom friend." The author's ecclesiastic portraits are as exact, according to our observation, as his brother's. Each class of Italian priests is portrayed with discrimination, and no writer has better exemplified the paralyzing and perverting influence of Romanism upon the integrity of domestic life, and the purity and power of political aspirations. The women, too, are typical,--remarkably free from fanciful embellishment, eloquent of race, instinct with nature. Their limited culture, social prejudices, artless charms, frugal lives, naïve or reticent characters, as modified by town and country, patrician or popular influences, we recognize at once as identical with what we have known in the households or social circles of Florence. Mr. Trollope, in all this, is a Flemish artist, and, as much of the interest of his pictures depends on their truthfulness, perhaps they are really appreciated only by those who have enjoyed adequate opportunities of becoming intimate with the original scenes, situations, and personages depicted. In the fidelity of his art he abstains from all attempts at brilliancy, and ignores the intense and highly dramatic,