day folk, such as all of us have met, and loved or endured.
Trollope fills very adequately a space between Thackeray and
Dickens, of whom the former deals for the most part with the
upper 'ten', the latter with the lower 'ten'; Trollope with the
suburban and country-town 'ten'; the three together giving us a
very complete and detailed picture of the lives led by our
grandmothers and grandfathers, whose hearts were in the same
place as our own, but whose manners of speech, of behaviour and
of dress have now entered into the vague region known as the
'days of yore'.

_The Three Clerks_ is an excellent example of Trollope's
handiwork. The development of the plot is sufficiently skilful to
maintain the reader's interest, and the major part of the
characters is lifelike, always well observed and sometimes
depicted with singular skill and insight. Trollope himself liked
the work well:--

'The plot is not so good as that of _The Macdermots_; nor
are any characters in the book equal to those of Mrs. Proudie and
the Warden; but the work has a more continued interest, and
contains the first well-described love-scene that I ever wrote.
The passage in which Kate Woodward, thinking she will die, tries
to take leave of the lad she loves, still brings tears to my eyes
when I read it. I had not the heart to kill her. I never could do
that. And I do not doubt that they are living happily together to
this day.

'The lawyer Chaffanbrass made his first appearance in this novel,
and I do not think that I have cause to be ashamed of him. But