This unscrupulous blackmailer is put before us with real art, with something of the loving preoccupation of the hunter for his quarry.

Trollope loved a rogue, and in his long portrait gallery there are several really charming ones.

He did not, indeed, perceive the aesthetic value of sin--he did not perceive the esthetic value of anything,--and his analysis of human nature was not profound enough to reach the conception of sin, crime being to him the nadir of downward possibility--but he had a professional, a sort of half Scotland Yard, half master of hounds interest in a criminal.

"See," he would muse, "how cunningly the creature works, now back to his earth, anon stealing an unsuspected run across country, the clever rascal;" and his ethical disapproval ever, as usual, with English critics of life, in the foreground, clearly enhanced a primitive predatory instinct not obscurely akin, a cynic might say, to those dark impulses he holds up to our reprobation.

This self-realization in his fiction is one of Trollope's principal charms.