The Sport of Our Jincestors 



era. He never invented any great plots, or dealt in any- 

 thing sensational, unless it were the mild sensation of the 

 forgery in Orley Farm ; rather than a creator he was an 

 accurate limner of the manners and customs of the day as 

 interpreted by stodgy, commonplace sort of people. He 

 was himself a post-office official whose duties caused him 

 to travel a great deal in the provinces, and there he must 

 have acquired much material for his intimate and amusing 

 accounts of the people who lived in the country, and above 

 all in the country towns. He seems to have been guided by 

 an unerring instinct where his experience might have been 

 at fault. He knew his way about the intricacies of courtesy 

 titles a great deal better than some writers who deal in high 

 rank. Indeed, it was said of him by Jehu Junior in the 

 * Vanity Fair * of the day that he was never known to commit 

 a solecism. 



But in addition to his half-cynical, half-good-natured 

 pictures of crinoline England, he excelled in his understand- 

 ing of two things. The one was the difference between a 

 Tory and a Whig, the other was Fox-hunting. The difference 

 in political temperaments appears all through * The Warden * 

 and its sequel/ Barchester Towers ^^ the two novels which first 

 began to make him famous. They were published in 1855 

 and 1857 respectively. In the opinion of many of his 

 readers they are the best that he wrote, ^ Bar Chester Towers ' 

 probably being his masterpiece. 



The dominant figure in both books is really Archdeacon 

 Grantly, the high-and-dry Tory Churchman who was pre- 

 244 



