Trollope's second series of Tales of All Countries (1863) shows a considerable advance over the first volume. The stories in this collection provide more in the way of local color, more allowance for passion among the characters, and more unforced humor and pathos than were evident in their generally anti-romantic predecessors. As in the first volume, Trollope's emphasis is on the universality of human experience, but now he permits some room for unconventional behavior as well. Two of the stories, "Mrs. General Talboys" and "A Ride Across Palestine," were deemed too indelicate to be offered to readers of the Cornhill Magazine (Thackeray's rejection of the former story, following its acceptance by Cornhill publisher George Smith, provoked Trollope to write an amusing attack on Victorian censorship); and when finally printed in the London Review, they elicited protests from readers with regard to the author's alleged moral lapses in subject matter and tone. Trollope usually pretended indifference to the quality and fate of his short stories; yet the modern reader need only compare the best works in the first series, "La Mère Bauche" and "The Château of Prince Polignac," with the best of the second series, "Aaron Trow" and "The Man Who Kept His Money in a Box" (Trollope's selection of these tales to begin and end each volume testifies to his awareness that they were the key works in each set), to see how literary sketches notable chiefly for their eventual resuscitation as novels gave way to stories of interest in their own right.

The most remarkable of the new stories is "Aaron Trow," Trollope's sympathetic and harrowing account of an escaped convict who, transformed by society into a beast of prey, accordingly acts like "a wolf rather than a man." Aaron's lack of self-discipline may have been responsible for the crime that led to his being sentenced to the Bermuda prison colony, but Trollope condemns the inhumane industrial community of Aaron's youth for having warped a potentially decent man: "Had the world used him well, giving him when he was young ample wages and separating him from turbulent spirits, he also might have used the world well; and then women would have praised the brightness of his eye and the manly vigour of his brow." In Great Expectations (serialized during the same year, 1861, that "Aaron Trow" appeared), Dickens also drew, in the figure of Abel Magwitch, a sympathetic portrait of an outcast of society; and George Eliot in Felix Holt (1866) went so far as to exonerate her own hero of a similar act of manslaughter, which occurs in the course of a mob riot. Trollope, however, eschewed the Romantic implications of his theme: he pities the outcast without sentimentalizing his plight. Aaron is by no means a noble savage, let alone a noble victim like one of Bulwer Lytton's criminal-heroes. By the time the story opens he has, in fact, lapsed into a state of desperate savagery.

And yet, by showing how Aaron's effect upon others—the patient Anastasia Bergen and her mild-mannered fiancé, Caleb Morton, a Presbyterian minister—is to bring out their repressed passionate and even murderous instincts, Trollope powerfully suggests a kinship between Aaron and them. "Anastasia Bergen had hitherto been a sheer woman, all feminine in her nature," writes Trollope of his heroine's struggle with the convict. "But now the foam came to her mouth, and fire sprang from her eyes, and the muscles of her body worked as though she had been trained to deeds of violence." Learning of the attempted outrage upon Anastasia, the minister is transformed from a "man of peace" to a "beast thirsting for blood." The two men fight a watery duel in which the convict is finally dispatched after being horribly mutilated in a manner reminiscent of the death of Nancy in Oliver Twist; but Caleb afterwards is appalled by his actions and by the discovery of his hidden nature. The potential for violence and irrational behavior in the most civilized and gentle of human frames was a theme Trollope was to use again to memorable effect in He Knew He Was Right; yet the novelist's fascination with social, and sometimes moral, outcasts is evident from his earliest Irish novels to some of the late books, notably Cousin Henry and Mr. Scarborough's Family. The distant West Indies setting of "Aaron Trow" allowed him here, as had the Irish settings previously, to examine those latent passions which he tended to gloss over in his English novels of the 1860s.

Of the two stories that Thackeray and George Smith found so objectionable, only "A Ride Across Palestine" could be called mildly indelicate. (The Saturday Review critic thought it the best story in the collection; while the reviewer for the Spectator detected a touch of Mrs. Frances Trollope's "broad farce" in this "clever" but "disagreeable" work.) Trollope may have been thinking of Twelfth Night and Byron's Lara, with their portraits of young women who dress in male clothing to serve as pages to a beloved master, when he concocted his tale of a maiden fleeing the custody of her uncle, who disguises herself as a young man and gradually falls in love with the unsuspecting narrator of the story, randomly chosen to be his/her traveling companion. The indelicacy is most evident in the passages when the narrator wonders what it is about his companion's face and tone of voice that makes him feel "that I loved him!" (The narrator is, however, married. One recalls other stories, and passages from Trollope's Autobiography, where he discusses his susceptibility to young women.) In "Mrs. General Talboys" the joke is against the enthusiastic protagonist who flaunts her Shelleyan disregard for the conventionalities, but is outraged when an impressionable young Irish artist takes her at her word and proposes an elopement. Perhaps Trollope was aiming a satiric shaft at the popularity of George Sand and Madame de Stäel: Mrs. Talboys claims to have "thrown down all the barriers of religion" in her search "for the sentiments of a pure Christianity"; and when on the subject of the liberation of Italy (the story takes place in the foreign artist circles in Rome), she flies "so high that there was no comfort in flying with her." But it is her espousal of the Shelleyan gospel of free love that is Trollope's ultimate target. Mrs. Talboys' "aspirations for freedom ignored all bounds, and, in theory, there were no barriers which she was not willing to demolish." In point of fact, however, the General's confidence in allowing his wife to take the trip to Rome without him is justified. One may utter Romantic platitudes yet remain frigidly conventional at heart, as Trollope demonstrates in many of his novels, especially The Eustace Diamonds, where again the target is Shelleyan and Byronic rhetorical sentimentalism.

In Trollope's stories it is young men who customarily mouth such romantic clichés, while his young women either suppress their genuinely romantic natures or else bear the burden of the practical responsibilities overlooked by the men. In "The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich," for example, Trollope contrasts the resourcefulness of his seemingly "tranquil" German heroine with her demonstrative but otherwise helpless English fiancé. (In effect, he retells the story of "John Bull on the Guadalquivir," this time from the woman's point of view.) Trollope's deft handling of the thoughts and feelings of young women was hailed by the Saturday Review critic of this volume as the novelist's specialty; but it was left to Henry James, who learned much from Trollope in this instance, to elaborate on the novelist's fictional "possession" of "the English girl." "He has presented the British maiden," noted James in his great valedictory study of Trollope, "under innumerable names, in every station and in every emergency in life, and with every combination of moral and physical qualities. . . . Trollope's heroines have a strong family likeness, but it is a wonder how finely he discriminates between them." In the second set of Tales of All Countries we are given examples of five seemingly patient young women—Anastasia Bergen in "Aaron Trow," Isa Heine in "The House of Heine Brothers," Patience Woolsworthy in "The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne," Elizabeth Garrow in "The Mistletoe Bough," and the young wife, Fanny Arkwright, in "Returning Home"—yet the variations on the theme of the testing of patience allow for very different kinds of stories.

Patience Woolsworthy, for example, may be seen as Trollope's version of "Patience on a monument / Smiling at grief (The remainder of Viola's speech in Twelfth Night also pertains to the theme of these stories: "We men may say more, swear more; but indeed / Our shows are more than will; for still we prove / Much in our vows but little in our love.") While not quite a little masterpiece on the order of Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cousin Phillis," which it resembles in subject matter, "The Parson's Daughter" is nonetheless a deft and touching account of a warmly affectionate young countrywoman abandoned by a worldly fiancé who professes displeasure at her honest admission of love for him but who marries instead a woman with money and social position. "She had given her whole heart to the man," Trollope declares at the end; "and, though she so bore herself that no one was aware of the violence of the struggle, nevertheless the struggle within her bosom was very violent. . . . The romance of her life was played out in that summer." A year later Trollope made Patience's dilemma Lily Dale's in The Small House at Allington; and the discreditable Captain Broughton reappears as Captain Aylmer in The Belton Estate. Another woman who conceals her passionate temperament under an apparently placid exterior is Isa Heine, whose "calm" demeanor is scolded by her fiance at the moment of her triumph: while he writes poetry in proof of his "romantic" nature, she sees to it that they will be financially enabled to marry. Trollope wittily suggests that Isa, under the guise of a stolid, Germanic Rose Bradwardine (Scott's domestic-minded heroine), is in fact a dynamic Flora MacIvor—straight out of "that grand English novel," Waverley, which Herbert Onslow has given her to read.

That excessive patience can be anything but a virtue is the pont of "The Mistletoe Bough," the first in a line of Christmas stories that Trollope was called on, reluctantly, to write. His heroine on this occasion has an "organic defect in her character . . . the bump of philomartyrdom"; and only the Christmas spirit prevents her from adhering to her puritanical determination to avoid doing whatever might bring her pleasure. A poignant example of feminine patience under extreme pressure is set by the young wife in "Returning Home," whose unwillingness to persuade her husband to rearrange their travel plans results in tragedy for both of them, and whose quiet suffering during that final journey makes for heartbreaking reading. In a volume devoted, as a reader might guess, to adventurous "tales of all countries"—including, this time, the less frequented parts of England—Trollope argues in "Returning Home" that nothing surpasses the romantic value of one's native home. Since "it is the destiny of our race to spread itself over the wide face of the globe," he concedes, "it is well that there should be something to gild and paint the outward face of that lot which so many are called upon to choose. But for a life of daily excitement, there is no life like life in England; and the farther that one goes from England the more stagnant, I think, do the waters of existence become."

The farther one goes from England, however, the more comedy one may also find in the blundering antics of Britons abroad and in the clash of different sets of customs. "What can a man do, in a strange country," sighs the hero of "George Walker at Suez," "when he is told that a native spits in his face by way of civility?" Where George Walker's fate is to be mistaken, briefly, for a visiting dignitary, the fate of the good-natured narrator of "The Man Who Kept His Money in a Box" is to be made to seem the thief of a box of valuables owned by a comical and outrageously vulgar English family. The latter story, in addition to being one of Trollope's most delightful short works, reminds us, as did "The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne" in a different way, of the author's affinities with James. The Greene clan are an early version of the kind of insufferable and unimpressionable tourists who turn up again in such James sketches as "The Pension Beaurepas." Trollope had seen many such people during his travels, just as he had once, like George Walker, been mistaken for a grandee during a visit to Verona. In the Autobiography he pens a marvelous account of the peregrinations of "a poor forlorn Englishman, who had no friend and no aptitude for travelling," and who, on re-encountering Trollope in the Pitti Palace, asked him, "Where is it that they keep the Medical Venus?" The wonderful humor of "The Man Who Kept His Money in a Box" reminds us (as the stories in the first series of Tales of All Countries did not) of Trollope's greatness as a comic writer; and the skill and subtlety with which he creates, in a minimum of pages, characters as various and distinctive as George Walker and the Greenes, Patience Woolsworthy and Aaron Trow, Mrs. Talboys and Mrs. Arkwright, testify to his increasing artistic commitment to the short story form.