considerable popularity. This fact would seem to show that the manners,
speech, etc., represented in them have a certain standard quality which
does not--like the manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook
and Surtees--lose appeal to fresh generations; and that the artist who
dealt with them must have had not a little faculty of fixing them in the
presentation. In fact it is probably not too much to say that of the
_average_ novel of the third quarter of the century--in a more than
average but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential
condition--Anthony Trollope is about as good a representative as can be
found. His talent is individual enough, but not too individual: system
and writer may each have the credit due to them allotted without
difficulty.

[26] His most ambitious studies in strict _character_ are the
closely connected heroines of _The Bertrams_ (1859) and _Can you
Forgive Her?_ (1864-1865). But the first-named book has never
been popular; and the other hardly owes its popularity to the
heroine.

A novelist who might have been in front of the first flight of these in
point of time, and who is actually put by some in the first flight in
point of merit, is Mrs. Gaskell. Born in 1810, she accumulated the
material for her future _Cranford_ at Knutsford in Cheshire: but did not
publish this till after Dickens had, in 1850, established _Household
Words_, where it appeared in instalments. She had a little earlier, in
1848, published her first novel, _Mary Barton_--a vivid but distinctly
one-sided picture of factory life in Lancashire. In the same year with
the collected _Cranford_ (1853) appeared _Ruth_, also a "strife-novel"
(as the Germans would say) though in a different way: and two years
later what is perhaps her most elaborate effort, _North and South_. A