Major Lambert of the "Virginians," and been helped on her way by
that good man? Assuredly Dugald Dalgetty in his wanderings in
search of fights and fortune may have crushed a cup or rattled a
dicebox with four gallant gentlemen of the King's Mousquetaires.
It is agreeable to wonder what all these very real people would
have thought of their companions in the region of Romance, and to
guess how their natures would have acted and reacted on each other.

This was the idea which suggested the following little essays in
parody. In making them the writer, though an assiduous and veteran
novel reader, had to recognise that after all he knew, on really
intimate and friendly terms, comparatively few people in the
Paradise of Fiction. Setting aside the dramatic poets and their
creations, the children of Moliere and Shakspeare, the reader of
novels will find, may be, that his airy friends are scarce so many
as he deemed. We all know Sancho and the Don, by repute at least;
we have all our memories of Gil Blas; Manon Lescaut does not fade
from the heart, nor her lover, the Chevalier des Grieux, from the
remembrance. Our mental picture of Anna Karenine is fresh enough
and fair enough, but how few can most of us recall out of the
myriad progeny of George Sand! Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, do you
quite believe in them, would you know them if you met them in the
Paradise of Fiction? Noun one might recognise, but there is a
haziness about La Petite Fadette. Consuelo, let it be admitted, is
not evanescent, oblivion scatters no poppy over her; but Madame
Sand's later ladies, still more her men, are easily lost in the
forests of fancy. Even their names with difficulty return to us,
and if we read the roll-call, would Horace and Jacques cry Adsum
like the good Colonel? There are living critics who have all Mr.
George Meredith's heroines and heroes and oddities at their finger