ends, and yet forget that musical name, like the close of a rich
hexameter, Clare Doria Forey. But this is a digression; it is
perhaps admitted that George Sand, so great a novelist, gave the
world few characters who live in and are dear to memory. We can
just fancy one of her dignified later heroines, all self-
renunciation and rural sentiment, preaching in vain to that real
woman, Emma Bovary. HER we know, her we remember, as we remember
few, comparatively, of Balzac's thronging faces, from La Cousine
Bette to Seraphitus Seraphita. Many of those are certain to live
and keep their hold, but it is by dint of long and elaborate
preparation, description, analysis. A stranger intermeddleth not
with them, though we can fancy Lucien de Rubempre let loose in a
country neighbourhood of George Sand's, and making sonnets and love
to some rural chatelaine, while Vautrin might stray among the
ruffians of Gaboriau, a giant of crime. Among M. Zola's people,
however it may fare with others, I find myself remembering few:
the guilty Hippolytus of "La Curee," the poor girl in "La Fortune
des Rougon," the Abbe Mouret, the artist in "L'Oeuvre," and the
half idiotic girl of the farm house, and Helene in "Un Page
d'Amour." They are not amongst M. Zola's most prominent creations,
and it must be some accident that makes them most memorable and
recognisable to one of his readers.

Probably we all notice that the characters of fiction who remain
our intimates, whose words come to our lips often, whose conduct in
this or that situation we could easily forecast, are the characters
whom we met when we were young. We may be wrong in thinking them
the best, the most true and living of the unborn; perhaps they only
seem so real because they came fresh to fresh hearts and unworn
memories. This at least we must allow for, when we are tempted to