beheld him about to make a balloon-ascension with a woman a great deal worse than she should have been. He was subsequently reclaimed, but the author often wished he had allowed him to die, for some readers, who did not know Dr. Holland, imagined the author was the original of this sorry character. Thackeray was continually identified with Pendennis, who, if he resembles him at all, resembles him in his less pleasant traits. Other authors have been identified by turns with their own romantic heroes and their desperate villains. Amélie Rives, it has been persistently asserted, drew her own portrait in the morbid, hysterical heroine of "The Quick or the Dead ?” In the preface to that novel she insisted that the critics had done her a great though unconscious honor in assuming that she intended Barbara for herself, as in doing so they had attributed to her an absolute honesty and an absence of vanity such as few mortals have been credited with. Barbara is beautiful in face and form, but all her idiosyncrasies are such as no woman would care to accuse herself of.

Such experiences are unpleasant enough, but they are no more unpleasant than to be accused of having unconsciously caricatured your friends and relatives. In his article on "The Critic on the Hearth," James Payn probably draws upon his own experience when he makes a country cousin write as follows: "Helen, who has just been here, is immensely delighted with your satirical sketch of her husband; he, however, as you may imagine, is wild, and says you had better withdraw your name from the candidates' book at his club. I do not know how many black balls exclude, but he has a good many friends here."

After the publication of "The House of the Seven Gables," Hawthorne was worried by people who insisted that they, or their families in the present or past generations, had been deeply wronged by his book. One man wrote complaining that his grandfather had been made infamous in the character of Judge Pyncheon. Now, his grandfather, Judge Pyncheon by name, was a Tory and refugee resident in Salem at the period of the Revolution, whom the correspondent described as the most exemplary old gentleman in the world. He therefore considered himself infinitely wronged and aggrieved, and thought it monstrous that the virtuous dead could not be suffered to rest quietly in their graves. "The joke of the matter is," says Hawthorne, in a letter to Fields, "that I never heard of his grandfather, nor knew that any Pyncheons had ever lived in Salem, but took the name because it suited the tone of my book and was as much my property for fictitious purposes as that of Smith. I have pacified him by a very polite and gentlemanly letter; and if ever you publish any more of 'The Seven Gables' I should like to write a brief preface expressive of my anguish for this unintentional wrong, and making the best reparation possible, else these wretched old Pyncheons will have no peace in the other world nor in this." A few weeks later he wrote again, "I have just received a letter from still another claimant of the Pyncheon estate. I wonder if ever, and how soon, I shall get a just estimate of how many jackasses there are in this ridiculous world. My correspondent, by the way, estimates the number of these Pyncheon jackasses at about twenty. I am doubtless to be remonstrated with by each individual. After exchanging shots with each one of them, I shall get you to publish the whole correspondence in a style to match that of my other works, and I anticipate a great run for the volume."

Thackeray drew down upon himself the indignation of the whole Irish public by taking as the heroine of his story of "Catherine" a famous murderess named Catherine Hayes, which happened to be exactly the same name as that of a famous Irish songstress. Professor Maurice was in early life the author of a novel called “Eustace Conway, or the Brother and Sister." He

sold the manuscript to Bentley about the year 1830, but, the excitement caused by the Reform Bill being unfavorable to light literature, it was not issued until 1834. The villain of the novel was called Captain Marryat, and Professor Maurice had soon the pleasure of receiving a challenge from the celebrated Captain Marryat. Great was the latter's astonishment on learning that the anonymous author of "Eustace Conway" had never heard of the biographer of "Peter Simple," and, being in holy orders, was obliged to decline to indulge in a duel.

Mr. F. W. H. Myers tells the story of how one day George Eliot and her husband were making good-humored fun over the mistaken effusiveness of a too sympathizing friend who insisted on assuming that Mr. Casaubon was a portrait of Mr. Lewes, and on condoling with the sad experiences which had taught the gifted authoress of "Middlemarch" to depict that gloomy man. "And there was indeed something ludicrous," says Mr. Myers, in the contrast between the dreary pedant of the novel and the good-natured self-content of the living savant who stood acting his vivid anecdotes before our eyes." "But from whom, then," said a friend, turning to Mrs. Lewes, "did you draw Casaubon?" With a humorous solemnity, which was quite in earnest, however, she pointed to her own heart.

Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," it will be remembered, was dedicated to William M. Thackeray, who had only recently published his "Vanity Fair." A critic surmised with infinite ingenuity that Currer Bell, whom he assumed to be a woman, might be the original of Thackeray's Becky Sharp, who in revenge had turned around and portrayed her caricaturist as Rochester. (See REVIEWS, CURIOSITIES OF.) This, of course, was simply laughable. But Charlotte Bronte got into more serious difficulties with regard to her too life-like local portraits in "Shirley." Mrs. Gaskell says of her Yorkshire sketches in this book, “ People recognized themselves or were recognized by others in her graphic descriptions of their personal appearance and modes of action and turns of thought, though they were placed in new positions and figured away in scenes far different to those in which their actual life had been passed." The three curates were real living men haunting Haworth and the neighboring districts, so obtuse in perception "that, after the first burst of anger at having their ways and habits chronicled was over, they rather enjoyed the joke of calling one another by the names she had given them." Yet Charlotte Brontë had never supposed they would be recognized. In a letter to a friend she expressly says, "You are not to suppose any of the characters in Shirley' are intended as literal portraits. It would not suit the rules of art, nor of my own feelings, to write in that style. We only suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate."

Dickens's "Bleak House" almost lost him the friendship of Walter Savage Landor, who recognized himself as Boythorn, and of Leigh Hunt, who was deeply wounded by the only too evident portraiture of himself as Harold Skimpole. Dickens, indeed, printed a very lame apology for the caricature, in which he disclaimed any intention of pillorying his friend. As a rule, he was successful in avoiding too marked a resemblance to the lay figure which had unconsciously posed to him. His method was to take some strikingly singular trait of character, some phenomenon in human nature, and surround it with qualities totally different from those found in the original. Thus he preserved the reality without exposing his model.

We are not told whether the elder Dickens descried himself in Micawber, but it is certain that very few people did until after the publication of Forster's biography. And was it of his own mother that Dickens says, in the preface to "Nicholas Nickleby," "Mrs. Nickleby, sitting bodily before me, once asked whether I really believed there ever was such a woman"? Fors

ter, who is grave over the complications which grew out of Harold Skimpole, was unconsciously the model of Kenny Meadows's portrait of Master Froth. All writers have not been so anxious to spare the feelings of their victims ; indeed, many of them have purposely used the novel or the drama as a medium for satirizing their enemies. Perhaps the earliest instance in the history of literature is that of Aristophanes, who brought Alcibiades, Socrates, and Euripides upon the stage in their own proper persons in order to heap sarcasm and ridicule upon them. Dante, it is well known, put his enemies into hell. He was imitated by Michael Angelo in his fresco of "The Last Judg ment." It is said that a cardinal, who had found his portrait among Michael Angelo's damned, hastened to complain to the Pope. "Are you sure that he has put you in hell?" said the latter. "Yes," cried the cardinal. "Then there is no hope for you. If he had put you in purgatory I might have obtained your release; but out of hell there is no redemption.'

The Elizabethan dramatists, as a rule, adopted the transparent veil of a fictitious name when they brought an adversary upon the stage; and this custom has been generally followed up to the present time, the only recent exception being that of "Cape Cod Folks," a novel which had more or less kindly caricatures of living people under their actual names. It will be remembered that this novel brought on a law-suit, which advertised the book very extensively and which was eventually compromised.

Dryden's satires, which were avowedly directed against the statesmen and literary men of whom he disapproved, always veiled their names under some transparent disguise; but this was done to add piquancy to his wit and verisimilitude to the allegorical form which he adopted, rather than from any desire to spare the feelings of his victims. Pope occasionally, but not always, followed Dryden's example. "The Rape of the Lock" and the "Imitations of Horace" need a key; but not so "The Dunciad," which brings all the Grub Street authors upon the stage under their own names. In the original poem the criticaster Theobald had been pilloried as the monarch of the dunces, but in the mean while Pope had fallen out with Colley Cibber, and the vengeful little poet gratified his spite at the expense of justice by substituting the name of that very clever man for Theobald's in his second edition.

Byron, who was always an admirer of Pope, and began his poetical life as an imitator of him, was equally free with the names of the supposed critical foes whom he attacked in his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." It is interesting to note that most of them (even Jeffrey, with whom he fought a duel) became subsequently his warm personal friends.

Bulwer's passage at arms with Tennyson is one of the curiosities of literature, and as such has been chronicled under the head of NEW TIMON.

Bulwer had always shown a predilection for hitting back. When the Athenæum attacked his "Devereux" he retorted in his next novel, “Paul Clifford," by satirizing it under the name of the Asinæum and its editor under the name of Peter McGrawler. In a rather good-natured review of “ Paul Clifford" the Athenæum said, “The character of the editor, McGrawler, is skilfully and delicately drawn. This luckless gentleman, failing to live by the Asinæum, turns pickpocket, then highwayman, then king's evidence against his kindest friend, then hangman, and lastly a writer in Blackwood's Magazine. Our limits do not allow us to dwell longer on this painful subject, so we must leave the public to applaud the refinement and judiciousness of this attack, and take leave of our assailant with a confession of the overwhelming confusion we feel."

This novel of "Paul Clifford" is Bulwer's most serious offence in the way of exciting vulgar curiosity by burlesques of living notables. Thus, Gentleman George, the keeper of a low boozing-den, is intended for the reigning

monarch, George IV., Bachelor Bill for the Duke of Devonshire, etc. This sort of personalities had been borrowed from the French, and was cultivated successfully by Mrs. Gore, Lady Morgan, Mrs. Trollope, and other lady novelists, and more especially by Disraeli, all of whose novels required a "key" to unlock their mysteries and depended largely on this fact for their

success.

Very different was the practice of a true artist like Walter Scott. In his prefaces he has given us full information as to the sources from which he drew his materials, and describes the original of almost every prominent character in his works. But if we turn from Helen Walker to Jeanie Deans, from Andrew Gemmells to Edie Ochiltree, we find that we have really learned nothing of the process by which these originals were transformed into characters more vivid, more real to us, than one-half of the flesh-and-blood people whom we know. Helen Walker is the original of Jeanie Deans in the same way that a block of marble is the original of the Venus de' Medici.

Thackeray, in his younger days, made savage fun of Bulwer, under the name of Bulwig, in a full-length portrait in "The Yellowplush Papers." And in his later days he was not averse to this method of punishing an enemy. "It was a pleasant peculiarity of Mr. Thackeray's,” says Edmund Yates, "to make some veiled but unmistakable allusion in his books to persons at the time obnoxious to him." During the awkward episode at the Garrick which lost to Yates the friendship of Thackeray, the seventh number of "The Virginians" came out with what Mr. Yates calls "a wholly irrelevant and ridiculously lugged-in-by-the-shoulders allusion to me as Young Grub Street in its pages." But Thackeray's portraits were not always meant to be ill-natured. Foker, for example, was drawn from Andrew Arcedeckne, who was reproduced, says Yates, "in the most ludicrously life-like manner, and, to Arcedeckne's intense annoyance, an exact wood-cut portrait of himself accompanied the text."

Though Thackeray meant no ill nature here, Arcedeckne never quite forgave him. On the night just after Thackeray had delivered his first lecture on "The English Humorists," Arcedeckne met him at the Cider-Cellar's Club, surrounded by a coterie who were offering their congratulations.

“How are you, Thack ?” cried Arcedeckne. "I was at your show to-day at Willis's. What a lot of swells you had there,-yes! But I thought it was dull, devilish dull! I'll tell you what it is, Thack, you want a piano."

That Thackeray meant no unkindness was evidenced by the facts that in the same book some of the sketches of Arthur Pendennis drawn by the author artist are recognizable portraits of Thackeray, and that the side-face of Dr. Portman in the wood-cut which represents the meeting of the doctor and his curate, Smirke, was said to resemble strongly that of Dr. Cornish, who was evidently the original from whom the good Portman was drawn. In the main, there is no doubt that what Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie says is true: "My father scarcely ever put real people into his books, though he of course found suggestions among the people with whom he was thrown." Perhaps a good idea of his method may be gained from his own letter to Mrs. Brookfield, in which he tells her, "You know you are only a piece of Amelia, my mother is another half, my poor little wife y est pour beaucoup," or from the "Roundabout Papers," in which he said that he had invented Costigan, “as I suppose authors invent their personages, out of scraps, heel-taps, odds and ends of characters."

Robert Browning attacked Wordsworth for what he considered his defection from the party of progress in "The Lost Leader," just as Whittier attacked Daniel Webster in "Ichabod." Browning also endeavored to expose the inner workings of Cardinal Wiseman's mind under the guise of

Bishop Blougram, and of Napoleon the Third's under that of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. He made a more direct attack upon the spiritualist John Home in "Sludge the Medium." Home recognized the portrait, and in revenge used to tell the following story. Some months before the poem was written, Home met Mr. and Mrs. Browning at Ealing, where a spiritualist séance relieved the tedium of a morning party. Among other manifestations, a wreath of clematis was lifted from the table by an invisible power and conveyed through the air in the direction of Mrs. Browning. Mr. Browning hastily left his seat on the opposite side of the table and moved to a spot behind his wife's chair, in the hope that even at the last moment the spirits might place on his brow the coronal, which he held to be his due; but the spirits knew what they were about, declined to gratify his vanity, and settled the crown on Mrs. Browning's head. Hinc illa lachrymæ: hence "Sludge the Medium."

Goethe says that all his writings are a confession. And this is probably true of all great authors. They have dipped into their own hearts to write. Consciously or unconsciously, they have unclothed their own minds. It is comparatively easy to trace their likeness in their works. They all have some character which obviously represents themselves or some part of themselves. Thus, Shakespeare is Hamlet, and he had strong mental affiliations with the melancholy Jaques. Milton is his own Satan, or at least in Satan he has drawn the proud, arrogant, self-assertive side of his own nature. Molière has sketched himself in Alceste, the hero of his " Misanthrope," a man whose originally generous, impulsive, and sensitive nature had been soured by contact with the coldness and insincerity of conventional society and incrusted itself behind an external appearance of cynicism. Alceste is the Hamlet of the artificial eighteenth century,-Hamlet drawn by an observer who keeps a keen eye upon the humorous possibilities of the character. As the character represents a type, it is not extraordinary that other originals were suggested, especially the Duc de Montausier, who in his native kindliness and acquired moroseness resembled both Molière and his hero. It is said that the duke, being informed that his portrait had been taken in the "Misanthrope," went to see the play, and only said, "I have no ill will against Molière for the original of Alceste, who, whoever he may be, must be a fine character, since the copy is so."

Goldsmith has shown an equally keen insight into his own foibles in the character of Honeywood, the hero of "The Good-Natured Man," whose aim in life it is to be generally beloved, who can neither refuse nor contradict, who gives away with lavish liberality to worthy and unworthy alike, who allows his servants to plunder him, who tries to fall in with the humor of every one and to agree with every one. How admirably suited to his own creator is Honeywood's confession when he determines on the reformation which Goldsmith, alas, could never make! "Though inclined to the right, I had not courage to condemn the wrong. My charity was but injustice, my benevolence but weakness, and my friendship but credulity." Fielding has undoubtedly painted himself in Tom Jones, with all his foibles and his weaknesses, and also with a fine manly want of bashfulness in the display of his own perfections. Farquhar in Sir Harry Wildair originated the character which Richardson afterwards perfected and made immortal in Lovelace, the gay, splendid, generous, easy, fine young gentleman, who throws the witchery of high birth and courteous manners and reckless dash over the qualities of the fop, the libertine, and the spendthrift. In Sir Harry Wildair Captain Farquhar drew his own portrait.

What is known as the Byronic hero, the Grand, Gloomy, and Peculiar soul, who shrouds himself in his own singularity, was first brought into literature