the realistic. In the latter the fusion of fact and fancy is too subtle to result in overt portraiture. What Dickens says of Squeers is true in some degree of all fictitious characters. All are drawn from observation, but none remain precisely as observed, after passing through the crucible of their creator's imagination. Of some we chance to know more definitely than of others that they were "taken from life." Disraeli, for instance, in his Coningsby, made the Honorable J. W. Croker into the politician Rigby, Lord George Manners into Henry Sidney, and Lord Hertford into the Duke of Monmouth. The last achieved his real immortality as the Marquis of Steyne, and Theodore Hook also had the double honor of being the original of Disraeli's Lucian Gay and Thackeray's Mr. Wagg. Richard Monckton Milnes became the Vavasour of Tancred, John Bright, the Mr. Turnbull of Phineas Redux, and Gerald Massey played the title rôle in Felix Holt. We are aware too that their own families supplied material to Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, and Meredith,[1] but we could hardly class Mr. Micawber, Shirley Keeldar (or her friend Caroline Helstone), Adam Bede, Dinah Morris, or Melchisedek Harrington as examples of personal satire, even when given satirical treatment.
It is natural, therefore, that the member of our group who stands preëminent in the line of individual satire is the one who also heads the list chronologically; that the next are the two Victorian forerunners; and that the only real Victorian left to complete this small tale does it by virtue of his early work. After Thackeray's burlesques, ending about 1850, the personal species becomes practically extinct.
Of Peacock's seven stories, the first three, published during the second decade of the century, are full of thinly
- ↑ Butler's etchings in The Way of All Flesh, are also from personal sources.
