“An Old Man's Love” is the last completed work of Anthony Trollope. The story may be briefly described as a new version of "Auld Robin Grey." The same drama with a different dénouement. Here it is the old lover who sacrifices himself, and after a bitter struggle, decides that the happiness of the woman he loves is more necessary to him than his own. The situation is well worked up, inasmuch as the renunciation is in no way the result of outward pressure, but the deliberate act of a conscientious nature stimulated into heroism by strong affection. We cannot say that the story is altogether a pleasant one; it affords too much scope for the minute chronicling of each phase of hesitating purpose which was always a besetting tendency in Mr. Trollope's writing; but it has a power of fixing the attention and absorbing the interest of the reader, which stamps it as the work of a master of the craft. —The Westminster Review, Volume 122 If this last novel of Mr. Anthony Trollope's is not one of his strongest, it is certainly one of his sweetest and most delicately filled in. It has no plot; it is rather a series of the most careful character studies, bound together by the tie of place and ordinary relationship. Mr. Trollope has confessed, in his Autobiography, that he thought Lily Dale a little of a prig. Of Mary Laurie we do not think that he could ever have spoken thus. She is so thoroughly pure, devoted, womanly to the core. The master has painted no finer portrait. And, though nothing was more common with him than to show the flaws and weaknesses in the strain of manly love—how it is apt to bend under the pressure of self-interest in many forms—he has been faithful to a higher ideal in his delineation of the passions of Mr. Whittlestaffe and John Gordon. Mary Laurie had been engaged to John Gordon before she became the ward of Mr. Whittlestaffe; but that did not prevent the older man falling in love with her; and when for years she heard nothing of John, was it to be wondered at that her feeling of gratitude should at length take on a warmer hue, and that she yielded to Mr. Whittlestaffe's representations? This is not to be wondered at so much as that Mr. Whittlestaffe, on John Gordon's reappearance, should resign his hopes of happiness for Mary's sake, and for the respect he learned to feel for John Gordon. This is really the whole, but it is so exquisitely told, with here and there a little bit of dainty analysis of the feelings of the persons concerned, that we read on and on, and are somewhat surprised that we should have been so absorbed in what is really so small an affair. In that we only yield testimony to the master's art. This is not a clerical novel, but there is a clergyman—the friend to whom John Gordon first goes on his return to England—who is delineated to the life, and must have been sketched from the life. —The British Quarterly Review, Volume 80