Still, such as they were, he has used them here with no
inconsiderable effect. His desire to be fair has led him to lay
stress in an inverse ratio to his prepossessions, and his Priest is
a better man than his parson.

The best, indeed the only piece of real characterization in the book
is the delineation of Abe Mollett. 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. Never was there a more subjective
writer. Unlike Flaubert, who laid down the canon that the author
should exist in his work as God in creation, to be, here or there,
dimly divined but never recognized, though everywhere latent,
Trollope was never weary of writing himself large in every man,
woman, or child he described.