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 Brontë'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 Brontë 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

This

monarch, George IV., Bachelor Bill for the Duke of Devonshire, etc. 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, I suppose authors invent their personages, out of scraps, heel-taps, odds and ends of characters."

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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

by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who in his “Nouvelle Héloïse" obviously painted himself in the dreary sentimentalist who poses as hero. But Childe Harold and Lara are great-grandchildren of Saint-Preux. They trace their lineage directly through Werther and René. Werther, although the incidents closely resemble the sorrowful life and story of a young man named Jerusalem, really represented the "Sturm und Drang" period of Goethe's own youth. "Werther," says Carlyle, "is but the cry of that deep-rooted pain under which all thoughtful men of a certain age were languishing. It paints the misery, it passionately utters the complaint, and heart and voice all over Europe loudly and at once responded to it." Among those who responded and who echoed the cry in a succeeding generation and in another country was Chateaubriand. René is as grand, as gloomy, and as peculiar as any of Byron's characters, and it is not at all surprising that Chateaubriand, forgetting his own indebtedness to Goethe, should have accused Byron of plagiarizing from himself; but as truly as René is the ideal which François René de Chateaubriand had formed of himself, Childe Harold is the ideal which Byron had formed of himself. And this ideal Byron is continually repeating in his succeeding poems, for his was essentially the lyrical and not the dramatic mind. As Macaulay says, Byron could exhibit only one man, a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters were universally considered merely as loose copies of Byron, and there is every reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered. Whether there ever existed or can ever exist a person answering to the description which he gave of himself may be doubted, but that he was not such a person is beyond all doubt." Nevertheless, most of the young men of the period strove to imitate him, and sought to describe themselves in prose or in poetry as beings of dark imaginings, whose souls had been seared, and the freshness of whose hearts had been dried at its source. For years the Minerva Press sent forth no novel without a mysterious, unhappy, Lara-like peer.

Something of this affectation survived in Disraeli, and in Bulwer (known sometimes as Byron with a small b), who in one of his last works, written long after the Byronic fever had spent itself,-in “Kenelm Chillingly,” in short, seeks to draw his own portrait as a great and mysterious soul in uncomfortable and uncongenial surroundings. But Byron's gloom is far more sincere than that of the young Disraeli or the superannuated Bulwer. Senancour is, however, the sincerest of all the contributors to the Literature of Despair, and in "Obermann" he has done what Byron and others have failed in, he has presented a true nineteenth-century Hamlet, he has given voice to the mal du siècle. Musset came very near doing the same thing in his "Confessions of a Child of the Age," but he is a little too lachrymose. He lacks the masculinity of Senancour.

Juliana von Krüdener has sometimes been called the female Werther, because in her novel "Valérie" she veiled in the garb of fiction an episode in her own life, the story of the love which her husband's secretary conceived for her, and which he was too noble to confess until he had resigned his position and fled from her side. But in truth she had been preceded by another famous lady novelist, who preceded not only her but Werther himself. This was the Countess de la Fayette, whose "Princess of Cleves" was published in 1677. It relates the story of the love of a married lady (the princess) for the Duc de Nemours, a gentleman of the court of Henry the Second of France. She acknowledges her love only to her husband, and flies from temptation into the country. When, as the result of a series of misappre hensions, her husband dies of a broken heart, she refuses to marry the duke.