"hid with Christ, in God," is not, God be praised, quite out of the reach of an observer's investigation or divination; except indeed he does not know that it is-except that great and melancholy privation, spiritual blindness, be upon him, and he be dark to all that needs to be spiritually discerned. If in a series of novels written by a Catholic there were no trace of such discernment, then, in that well-nigh impossible case, it would be fair to say that spiritual blindness must positively exist. But, in the case of a Protestant novelist, such a judgment would be rash, and we have only to acknowledge the exceeding difficulty experienced by Catholics in apprehending the point of view of such a novelist when he deals, as Mr. Trollope deals, with numerous and large sections of human society. He systematically excludes an element, a motive, a growing cause, an ever-active influence, which we systematically include, and therefore, to our minds, there is in his work a radical intellectual incompleteness which is most plain and pervading in the instances where his insight is most true, his observation most keen and just, and his artistic finish most perfect. His views of human nature are on the whole healthy and sound, but they lack the one thing which could give them completeness, the teaching of the Catholic Church upon the facts and the condition of human nature. The same holds good for the particular as for the general. His famous stories of the contending Churchmen are incomplete, not because the disputants do not understand that what they want is a Church, but because he does not see it, because he puts forward the rivalries, differences, and disputes as serious, and of import in themselves, whereas we know they are all equally foolish and without foundation. So we have to read them as it were doubly interpreted; by their own statement, and again by his kindly satire and delicate delineation, all unconscious that he himself is in the Dædalian maze. The mental struggles, the difficulties, the fluctuations which all his very good people undergo, not the sinners, but the virtuous and estimable,— arise for the most part from the fact that they do not live under a law, that they have not sacraments, that their consciences are tender and undirected, that their feelings are sensitive and undisciplined. The struggles, the difficulties, and the fluctuations are very interesting to read about, but the study is an incomplete one, because the writer knows no better than they know what it is they lack, and his provisions for their all being comfortable and happy seem to us fugitive and futile. Concerning ordinary novels these considerations would not present themselves to us at all, but Mr. Trollope's novels suggest them, because they deal so much with the mental condition.

of the people in them; because they treat of motives as largely as of actions; and because he possesses the art of making his people so real that they are not characters in books to us, but men and women, whose fortunes we follow, in many instances from youth to middle age, through the strife of motives, and the development of aims.

Mr. Trollope's novels may be divided into three classes, the clerical, the domestic, and the Irish. Of these three classes, the clerical is the most famous, and the Irish is the least appreciated. In our opinion, the Irish novels furnish the most striking evidence of Mr. Trollope's rare ability, and the comparative absence of appreciation of these novels by the public supports us in that position. Novels which deal with Irish life have been out of fashion since Miss Edgeworth's time; Maxwell and Lever notwithstanding. The one presented the romantic side of Irish affairs, the other wrote brilliant stories, with certain superficial points of likeness to Irish life, chiefly of a pleasant social kind, but which, when they treated of deeper and wider questions, did so in a purely conventional and English tone. Banim and Carleton were not widely read in England, and it is with the fashion of literature we are now concerned. Mr. Trollope is an Englishman who should be, judging by the tone and tendencies of his other works, wholly unsympathetic with Ireland and the Irish in every sense, and on every subject. That the chronicler of Barsetshire, the faithful delineator of society in all its towny aspects, of parliamentary life, of official life, of commercial life, of club life, of that hallowed institution known as "the domestic hearth of England," and so talked about, before the last phase of modernism developed itself, that it might have been supposed no other nation or country in the world had any domesticity at all; that the student of the English young lady, her matchmaking mamma, and her coaxing, flattering sisters,-that this writer should understand Ireland so thoroughly, and delineate it so faithfully, is truly astonishing. He lived in the country a long time, but so have many other clever Englishmen, who can and do write, lived there too, and learned nothing about it. That Mr. Trollope should have liked the place, as a good hunting country, and should have inquired into the statistics of its foxes and its packs of hounds, would have been but natural. But who would have supposed that any Englishman could have written such works as "The MacDermots of Ballycloran," "The Kellys and the O'Kellys," "Castle Richmond," and lastly, "Phineas Finn," though the scene of the latter story is the English capital and Parliament, and the perfe

evenness of the effect of the other two is wanting in the more brilliant and happier narrative. If an Irishman had written the first of these books, the achievement would have been less surprising, but we cannot imagine any Irishman bringing to the task such unsoftened candour, such entire impartiality. Either love of his countrymen on the one hand, if he were of the class of Irishmen who do love their countrymen, or prejudice of social position and creed, if he were of the class who do not, must have interposed, in the one case to brighten and soften, in the other to darken and harden the picture. But this Englishman, keenly observant, painstaking, absolutely sincere and unprejudiced, with a lynx-like clearness of vision, and a power of literal reproduction of which his clerical and domestic novels, remarkably as they exhibit it, do not furnish such striking examples, writes a story as true to the saddest and heaviest truths of Irish life, as racy of the soil, as rich with the peculiar humour, the moral features, the social oddities, the subtle individuality of the far west of Ireland, as George Eliot's novels are true to the truths of English life, and rich with the characteristics of Loamshire. The English public, who so fully appreciate his clerical and domestic studies, have no means of learning how great is the merit of the Irish series, and probably consider them, for books by Mr. Trollope, rather heavy reading. If the author had made them lighter, he must have sacrificed some of their reality. They deal with heavy themes, and though they contain samples of Irish humour which prove that Mr. Trollope has thoroughly imbibed its spirit, and mastered its forms more completely than any other writer who ever studied them, the turmoil, the perplexity, the failure, the passion, the disjointedness which marked the period of which he wrote, in Ireland, are too faithfully delineated to permit the general effect to be anything but harsh and sombre. "The MacDermots of Ballycloran" is one of the most melancholy books that ever was written. Its tone is subdued, quiet, matter-offact. The author has materials out of which almost any other writer would have constructed something more emotional and striking; but he uses them with a sober seriousness which is deeply impressive. There are only two persons introduced into this one tragedy of his upon whom the reader dwells with pleasure; one is Mrs. McKeon, the kindly woman who befriends to her unavailing utmost the wretched brother and sister whose fate is so awfully sad; the other is Father John Maguire, the exemplary priest, who is an easily recog nized type by all who know what the priest is to his people in the remote Irish parishes. The MacDermots, in the deca

dence of their fortunes, are drawn with a master's hand; the semi-idiotic old father; the harassed, ignorant, well-meaning, heavy-hearted son, little more than a peasant, but flattered by the peasants for the "old blood," and schemed for by the disaffected, proud, sensitive, and honourable in his lumpish, uncivilized way, a born victim with his destiny in his face; the handsome, slatternly, novel-reading sister, motherless, without a defined rank in even the society of such a place, half a lady, but the companion of shopkeepers and servants, vain, passionate, but modest even in her fall, ashamed of her uncouth brother though uncouth herself, devoted to infatuation to the underbred, manly, flirting, strong, brave, unfeeling, unprincipled man, who tempts her, to her swift destruction and his own. The plot of this story is very much superior to any other of Mr. Trollope's plots. Plots are not a strong point with him; he is indifferent about them, heeding samenesseven repetition-not at all, and relying, with reasonable confidence, upon his power of fixing attention upon the people in his books so firmly that it shall not stray to the incidents. But in this one instance he has bestowed equal care upon plot and personages. The book is as fine as a story, as it is perfect as a delineation of character; a book which must have produced supreme satisfaction to its author, though he was probably aware that it would not find anything like universal appreciation. There is one phase of Irish peasant character portrayed in the story with startling and painful accuracy, in the person of Pat Brady, an appendage to MacDermot's household, in whom the reader at once surmises an evil influence. Here is the passage, in itself a sample of the author's accurate knowledge of his subject, in which Brady is introduced. The scene is poor Thady MacDermot's rent-office, where he is going over the rent-book:

Pat's business was not only to assist in collecting the rents, by taking possession of the little crops, and driving the cows or the pigs, but, moreover, he was expected to know who could, and who could not, make out the money; to have obtained and always have ready that secret knowledge of the affairs of the estate which is thought to be, and is so, necessary to the managing of the Irish peasantry in the way they are managed. Pat Brady was all this; moreover, he had as little compunction in driving the cow or the only pig from his neighbour or cousin, and in selling off the oats or potatoes of his uncle or brother-in-law, as if he was doing that which would be most agreeable to them. But still he was liked on the estate; he had a manner with him which had its charms to them; he was a kind of leader of them in their agrarian feelings and troubles; and, though the tenants of Ballycloran half feared, they all liked and courted Pat Brady. "Well, Pat," began his master, seating himself on the solitary

old chair, which, with a still older-looking desk on four shaking legs, comprised the furniture of MacDermot's rent office, "What news from Mohill to-day? was there much in the fair at all?"

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'Well, yer honour, then, for them as had money to buy, the fair was good enough; but for them as had money to get, it was as bad as them that was

afore it, and as them as is likely to come after it."

"Were the boys in it, Pat?"

"They wos, yer honour, the most iv them."

"Well, Pat?"

"Oh, they wos just there, that's all."

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Jim Brady should have got the top price for that oats of his, Pat."

"Maybe, he might, Masther Brady."

"What did he get? There should be twelve barrels there."

'Eleven, or thereabouts, yer honour."

"Did he sell it all yesterday?"

"Divil a grain, then, at all at all, he took to the fair yesterday."

"Bad manners to him, and why did'nt he? Why, he owes (and Thady turned over the old book) five half-years' this gale, and there's no use gammoning; father must get the money off the land, or Flannelly will help himself."

"I know, Master Brady, I know all about it. Jim has between five and six acres, and he owes twenty-two pound ten; his oats is worth, maybe, five pound fifteen, from that to six pound, and his cow about six pound more ; that's all Jim has, barrin' the brats and the mother of them. An' he knows right well, yer honour, if he brings you the price of the oats, you would'nt let him off that way, for the cow should folly the oats, as is nathural; the cabin would be saized next; so Jim ses, if you choose to take the cow yourself, you can do so, well an' good, an' save him the throuble of bringin' it to Mohill."

"Did the Widow Reynolds sell her pig?" "She did, yer honour, for two pound ten. And Dan Houlahan--."

And she owes seven pound.

"I'll cut it for him, then. Was ould Tierney there?"

"He wos, yer honour, and I was tellin' him yer honour 'd be wantin' the money this week, and I axed him to step up o' Friday mornin'; an', sis I, Misthur Tierney,- for since he made out the mare and the ould car, it's Misthur Tierney he goes by-it's a fine saisin, anyway, for the corn, sis I, the Lord be praised; an' the hay all saved on them illigant bottoms of yours, Misthur Tierney. The masther was glad to hear the cocks was all up before the heavy rain was come! Well, Pat,' sis he, 'I'll be at Ballycloran o' Friday, plase God, but it's little I'll have wid me but meself; an' if the masther likes the corn an' the hay, he may just take them as it's plazin' to him, for the divil a cock or a grain will I sell, an' the prices so bad.'

"Obstinate old fool! Why, Pat, he must have the money."

"Money! to be shure he has the money, Misthur Brady; but maybe he'd

be the bigger fool if he giv' it to yer father."

"Do the boys mane to say they won't pay the rent at all?"