at Pitt and Dundas. Rolle lived long, dying in 1842 at the age of ninety-two. Wraxall says of him: "Nature had denied him all pretensions to grace or elegance. Neither was his understanding apparently more cultivated than his manners were refined. He reminded me always of a Devonshire rustic."

It will be remembered that Sir Pitt was one of the many admirers of the wily Becky Sharp and would have married her if his son Rawdon had not gotten in ahead of him. Many have been the surmises as to who sat for this never-to-be-forgotten picture of a scheming, worldly, and yet not altogether bad woman. Gossip has it that Becky is partly invention and partly real, and that the reality was suggested by a governess who lived as the companion of a very rich, selfish, old woman, in the neighborhood of Kensington Square. Strangely enough, the author had read his model sufficiently accurately to prophesy well, for Vanity Fair had been published some years when the companion followed almost exactly in the footsteps of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, running away with her employer's nephew, and, for a while, creating quite a sensation in society in Mrs. Crawley's way and by her methods. In the end, she fled the country and was later seen on the continent, flitting from gambling place to gambling place.

Amelia Osborne, Becky's friend, was made up of Mrs. Brookfield, Thackeray's mother, and his wife as she was before her unfortunate malady. It is curious that so fecund a genius, with three such women to pattern after, should have been content with turning out such a milk-and-water person, nor can one help but feel that the quite unromantic Dobbin (who, by the way, was Archdeacon Allen, Thackery's school-fellow and life-long friend), deserved all that he certainly got for allowing himself to grow maudlin over such a weakling. Much greater justice was done the model and the conception of a good woman when Mrs. Brookfield sat for Lady Castlewood, whom Henry Esmond married when he found that he could not get Beatrix.

As the unerring decision of posterity has set George Eliot's name alongside of those of Dickens and Thackeray, in enduring worth as in perennial charm, so in this greatest of women novelists is again found that facile skill in deriving no small portion

of her "inspirations" from the actual folk she knew and studied. There are those who class Middlemarch with Vanity Fair or Our Mutual Friend, from the standpoint of human interest, and will pick out the precise, self-centred, scholarly Casaubon, white moles and formal phrases and all, as one of the most compelling figures in that premier story of English provincial life. Had he a counterpart in real life? one wonders. He did: Professor Mark Pattison, biographer of Milton and one of the most widely read men Oxford ever produced. His wife, afterwards the unfortunate Lady Dilke, a most gracious and pleasing personality, was the Dorothea in the same book, as she was also the Belinda in Rhoda Broughton's novel of the same name and the Lady Grace who figures in Mallock's New Republic.

Some ten years ago there was living in New York City, at the age of eighty, a writer and quaint philosopher by name Alfred Louis; a Hebrew of striking, patriarchal presence, tall and broad-shouldered, with great flowing beard. Most of his life was spent in London, where he was the friend of Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and many of the other lights of the Victorian era. He was the original of Mordecai in Daniel Deronda and also sat for that yet greater and more convincing portrait of a Jew,-Ben Raphael in Hypatia. Mr. Evans, George Eliot's father, was drawn upon largely for the characters of Adam Bede and Caleb Garth; he had the extraordinary physical strength and determination of Adam together with the self-distrust of Caleb and his submissiveness in domestic relations. Her brother sat for Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, "hard-headed though never hard-hearted," and she drew herself in Maggie Tulliver.

Scott's originals were largely drawn from those colorful, picturesque, sharply outlined Highland people whom "The Wizard of the North" knew so intimately and loved so unswervingly. The origin of Dominie Sampson "who had won his way thro' the classics, but fallen to leeward in life's voyage," seems to belong to one George Thomson, a protégé of Sir Walter's, who possessed a deal of learning and some real ability, but also so large an assortment of unpleasant eccentricities as to defy the efforts of his patron to get him a living. And all the world knows that

the Rebecca of Ivanhoe was Rebecca Gratz, a Philadelphia Jewess. It was Washington Irving who introduced her to the author, and her story undoubtedly suggested details in that of the daughter of Isaac; she had, for instance, refused her lover on the ground of the incompatibility of their faiths and had then devoted her life to works of charity.

The romance of Lucy Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor was tragically close to that of Jane Dalrymple, eldest daughter of James, Viscount Stair, of the mid-seventeenth century, who stabbed her bridegroom on their wedding night and shortly after died a grinning maniac. Meg Merrilies, close kin to Macbeth's witches, is probably based on Jean Gordon of Yetholen, a gypsy who, after the '45, sang Jacobite songs to the Carlisle mob and died of the consequences. The supposed original of Di Vernon the brilliant, dashing, beautiful mistress of Osbaldistone Hall, in Rob Roy was a Scotch girl named Jane Ann Cranstown. Her career may be said to have begun and ended in connection with Scott, for as a girl she had been his intimate and confidante, while her death was hastened by word of his passing. Married to an Austrian, Count Winceslaus, before the Waverley series had been initiated (when Sir Walter was all England's poet and nobody's tale-teller), she had crossed to the Continent, passed through many vicissitudes with her husband during the later Napoleonic era, and had then inherited, as his widow, a mediæval castle in Styria, where with her memories she lived out another score of years. Scott sent her each of his stories, as they appeared,—saving only Rob Roy itself! Was he, perhaps, afraid his dear friend would find her portrait too faithfully limned?

It should be added that while Scott borrowed on all hands his raw material, the finished product cannot be called an exact portrait in any such sense as the phrase may well be used of Dickens and Eliot. And exactly the same comment is to be made of Dumas, who admittedly followed in Sir Walter's steps. D'Artagnan, for example, is his creator's own literary offspring, although it is settled beyond a doubt that the foundation lies in an historic personage, who really was killed leading his musketeers at the siege of Maistricht in 1673, as a marshal's

baton was on its way to him from King Louis. As to the three friends, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos, they appear in the Memoirs of d'Artagnan, recently unearthed and republished, two of them under the slightly different spelling of Aramits and Porthan. Dumas, however, had utterly changed the facts of their lives, crowding into their careers the characteristics and experiences of a score of D'Artagnan's friends alluded to in the Memoirs.

Coming to more modern letters, there is ever-living interest in Du Maurier's Trilby and speculations as to the orginals of its characters. It is known that Whistler was caricatured as Joe Sibley, but the artist (as was his genial wont!) made such a riot about it that the author changed the entertaining Joe into the harmless Anthony. After this had been effected, the erratic painter cabled his congratulations to Du Maurier upon his "new and obscure friend Anthony." Joseph Rowley who died in 1908 is supposed to have been the main inspiration for Taffy. As a young man he spent some time in Paris for the purpose of learning French, and was brought into more or less intimate relations with such notable English artists as Du Maurier, Whistler, and Poynter. Physically, he was a splendid specimen of manhood and noted for prodigious strength. The prototype of the creepy, fascinating Svengali,-made, if possible, still more famous by Wilton Lackaye's stage representation,—was Louis Brasson, a famous Belgian pianist whom the author knew in Antwerp and Düsseldorf, though pure imagination greatly enhanced the dramatic importance of the original.

Everyone who loves Mark Twain recalls the "Poet Lariat" in Innocents Abroad. He was taken from an acquaintance of the humorist, a successful business man and farmer with a fad for poetry, who believed himself particularly inspired and able to pen immortal verse on any subject at a moment's notice. Needless to say he was suffering under a delusion. Julian F. Scott, the owner of the famous old-time "Scott's Tavern' in Morgan County, East Tennessee, has been said to have sat for Colonel Mulberry Sellers, that mixture of laughter and pathos, but Mr. Clemens himself (who ought to know) implies unmistakably that here was a life portrait of James Lampton, "my mother's favorite cousin." And Tom Sawyer is a name to conjure with.

The exact original of Tom is not known, although there are hints that he is drawn from Mark's own boyhood. The name, however, is that of an early-day's friend, a pioneer steamboat engineer, volunteer fireman and vigilante.

One closes, yielding to a temptation to become cynical. Would it be interesting or mainly disillusioning to meet and talk with the originals of our best-loved literary friends?

H. MERIAN ALLEN.

Philadelphia, Pa.