Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1882-12-27
Trollope's Place in Literature.

London Spectator, December j.
The death of Mr.. Anthony Trollope, with.
out familiar knowledge of whose works
no historian who emulated the style OF
Macaulay would even attempt to delineate
English society in the third quarter of the
present century, marks almost the close OF
an era. We can never again recall tic
endless gallery of his social pictures with
out associating with them the thought tina
he whose imaginative world they peopled
he whose offspring, indeed, they in some
sense were-has passed away, and that
more and more from the present date they
will represent the figures, not of the pres
ent, but of former age. For some time
past, indeed, many of his best-known fig
ures have been assuming a slight
ly remote aspect, not only to the
world as it is, but even to the world as he
himself more recently pictured it. Even
in his own pages the old order had
changed, giving place to new. His second
Duke of Omnium was avery different figure
from his first, and a much nobler one,
while in the third generation, Lord Silver
bridge, with more, perhaps, of generous
impulse than his father, had far less of
his dig nifty and of his profound sense of
abounded to the delight of the reader in
Mr.. Trollope's earlier and middle period,
have grown fewer and less interesting of
late yea Sin 'The Dukes Children if
we remember rightly, there was not one.
Probably the type of the modern clergy
man had changed and become less inteli
gible to MI. Trollope, Septimus Harding
seems to have lived quite a long
{lx,
has an old-fashioned air, and
Dean Arabir himself must have
gone. though Mr.. Trollope never told us of
his decease. Natural selection had brought
specializing stockholders, American SEN
ators and American heiresses into the fore
ground of Mr.. Trollope's pictures before
he left US, and the advance of both pluto
cratic and democratic ideas might haYe
been steadily traced III the vivid social pic
lures with which he SO literally supplied
US. We shall still, we imagine, have post
humous children of Mr.. Trollope's, though
the fancy which produced them has passed
to other worlds than ours; for his was a
wonderfully prolific mind, always before
hand with the world, and we believe
that there is more than one complete story
of his writing of which not page has yet
seen the light. Still, now that he himself
is gone, the changes creeping rapidly ove1
the outlines, lights and shadows OF
the social diorama with which he presented
US, will seem to be more conspicuous than
usual as we gaze at his lively scenes, and
before another generation passes away Mr.
TroIlope's works will rank with those o.
other great novelists rather as works help
ing US to revive the past than as works Of
which it is the great merit to interpret thu
relations in which we actually live.
Probably no English writer of his day
has amused Englishmen SO much as Mr.
Trollope, or has given them that amuse
ment from sources so completely free from
either morbid weaknesses or mischievou!
and dangerous taints. His name will live
in our literature, and though it will Ger
tainly not represent the higher regions o
imaginative life, it will picture the societ.
of our day with fidelity with which SO
ciety has never been pictured before in tn
history of the world.