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 middle of the nineteenth century? Or if some 'medium' could call us up for cross-examination, should we have to warn posterity not to trust too implicitly to the portraiture? Trollope's best achievement, I take it, was the series of Barsetshire novels. They certainly passed at the time for a marvel of fidelity. Trollope tells us that he was often asked when he had lived in a cathedral close and become intimate with archdeacons; and had been able to answer that he had never lived in a close and had never spoken to an archdeacon. He had evolved the character, he declares, 'out of his moral consciousness,' and is pleasantly complacent over his creation. Though one would not like to disparage the merits of the performance, the wonder seems to be pretty simple. Trollope had been to Harrow and Winchester; the headmaster of one had become a dean, and the headmaster of the other a bishop. He afterwards spent two years riding through English country, and a visit, during this period, to Salisbury close, had suggested the first Barchester novel. It is not wonderful that, after such experience, he should have been equal to the costume of archdeacons; and, apart from their costumes, archdeacons are not essentially different, I fancy,