U N NTIL A FEW years ago most students of Anthony Trollope either ignored his style altogether or dismissed it, as one typical commentator does, as flat and dull. I Trollope himself says nothing to encourage the idea that his writing would reward close scrutiny: his principal concern as a stylist, he makes plain in An Autobiography, simply to make his words pleasant, 'intelligible without trouble, and pellucid that the meaning should be rendered without an effort to the reader. 2 It to the matter of his books-their characters and stories, and their freight of moral implication-that he wants his audience to pay attention, not to the manner in which they are written, and he tries, like an anonymous craftsman in wood or stone, so to wield his tools as to leave no mark of them on the finished product. He always a little contemptuous of the self-conscious literary artist, the man who thinks much of his words as he writes (Autobiography, pp. 152153): skill of tongue and glibness of speech, he observes in The Duke's Children, is hardly an affair of intellect at all. It is,as style to the writer,-not the wares which he has to take to market, but the vehicle in which they may be carried (I, 244). Despite Trollope's avowed lack of interest in style, and despite the tradition that his work is, as Michael Sadleir puts it, wholly undistinguished in treatment, 3 the tendency of critics lately has been to give at least some passing attention to his language and