People have often compared the personal impressions which eminent writers make on those who talk to them with the impressions previously derived from their works. Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning used to be taken as two instances representing opposite extremes. Carlyle always talked in character: had there been phonographs in his days, the phonographed "record" might have been printed as part of one of his books. Browning, on the other hand, seemed unlike what his poems had made a reader expect: it was only after a long _tête-à-tête_ with him that the poet whose mind had been learned through his works stood revealed. Trollope at first caused a similar though less marked surprise. This bluff burly man did not seem the kind of person who would trace with a delicate touch the sunlight sparkling on, or a gust of temper ruffling, the surface of a youthful soul in love. Upon further knowledge one perceived that the features of Trollope's talent, facile invention, quick observation, and a strong common-sense view of things, with little originality or intensity, were really the dominant features of his character as expressed in talk. Still, though the man was more of a piece with his books than he had seemed, one could never quite recognise in him the delineator of Lily Dale.
As a painter of manners he recalls two of his predecessors--one greater, one less great than himself. In his limitations and in his fidelity to the aspects of daily life as he saw them, he resembles Miss Austen. He is inferior to her in delicacy of portraiture, in finish, in atmosphere. No two of his books can be placed on a level with _Emma_ and _Persuasion_. On the other hand, while he has done for the years 1850-1870 what Miss Burney did for 1770-1790, most critics will place him above her both in fertility and in naturalness. Her characters are apt either to want colour, like the heroines of _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, or to be so exaggerated, like Mr. Briggs and Miss Larolles, as to approach the grotesque. Trollope is a realist in the sense of being, in all but a few of his books, on the lines of normal humanity, though he is seldom strong enough to succeed, when he pierces down to the bed-rock of human nature, in rendering the primal passions either solemn or terrible. Like Miss Austen, he attains actuality by observation rather than by imagination, hardly ever entering the sphere of poetry.