Thackeray has charmingly told us of his.

Of the few novels that can really be enjoyed when the reader is settling down for slumber almost all have been set forth by writers who--consciously or unconsciously--have placed character before plot; Thackeray himself, Miss Austen, Borrow, Marryat, Sterne, Dickens, Goldsmith and--Trollope.
Books are very human in their way, as what else should they be, children of men and women as they are?
Just as with human friends so with book friends, first impressions are often misleading; good literary coin sometimes seems to ring untrue, but the untruth is in the ear of the reader, not of the writer.

For instance, Trollope has many odd and irritating tricks which are apt to scare off those who lack perseverance and who fail to understand that there must be something admirable in that which was once much admired by the judicious.

He shares with Thackeray the sinful habit of pulling up his readers with a wrench by reminding them that what is set before them is after all mere fiction and that the characters in whose fates they are becoming interested are only marionettes.

With Dickens and others he shares the custom, so irritating to us of to-day, of ticketing his personages with clumsy, descriptive labels, such as, in _The Three Clerks_, Mr.Chaffanbrass, Sir Gregory Hardlines, Sir Warwick West End, Mr.Neverbend, Mr.Whip Vigil, Mr.Nogo and Mr.Gitemthruet.He must plead guilty, also, to some bad ways peculiarly his own, or which he made so by the thoroughness with which he indulged in them.