Every fancy which dwells much with the unborn and immortal
characters of Fiction must ask itself, Did the persons in
contemporary novels never meet? In so little a world their paths
must often have crossed, their orbits must have intersected, though
we hear nothing about the adventure from the accredited narrators.
In historical fiction authors make their people meet real men and
women of history--Louis XI., Lazarus, Mary Queen of Scots, General
Webbe, Moses, the Man in the Iron Mask, Marie Antoinette; the list
is endless. But novelists, in spite of Mr. Thackeray's advice to
Alexandre Dumas, and of his own example in "Rebecca and Rowena,"
have not introduced each other's characters. Dumas never pursued
the fortunes of the Master of Ravenswood after he was picked up by
that coasting vessel in the Kelpie's Flow. Sometimes a meeting
between characters in novels by different hands looked all but
unavoidable. "Pendennis" and "David Copperfield" came out
simultaneously in numbers, yet Pen never encountered Steerforth at
the University, nor did Warrington, in his life of journalism,
jostle against a reporter named David Copperfield. One fears that
the Major would have called Steerforth a tiger, that Pen would have
been very loftily condescending to the nephew of Betsy Trotwood.
But Captain Costigan would scarcely have refused to take a sip of
Mr. Micawber's punch, and I doubt, not that Litimer would have
conspired darkly with Morgan, the Major's sinister man. Most of
those delightful sets of old friends, the Dickens and Thackeray
people, might well have met, though they belonged to very different
worlds. In older novels, too, it might easily have chanced that
Mr. Edward Waverley of Waverley Honour, came into contact with
Lieutenant Booth, or, after the Forty-five, with Thomas Jones, or,
in Scotland, Balmawhapple might have foregathered with Lieutenant
Lismahagow. Might not even Jeanie Deans have crossed the path of