This was the idea which suggested the following little essays in parody. In making them thewriter, though an assiduous and veteran novel reader, had to recognise that after all heknew, on really intimate and friendly terms, comparatively few people in the Paradise ofFiction. Setting aside the dramatic poets and their creations, the children of Molière andShakspeare, the reader of novels will find, may be, that his airy friends are scarce so manyas he deemed. We all know Sancho and the Don, by repute at least; we have all ourmemories of Gil Blas; Manon Lescaut does not fade from the heart, nor her lover, theChevalier des Grieux, from the remembrance. Our mental picture of Anna Karénine is freshenough and fair enough, but how few can most of us recall out of the myriad progeny of George Sand! Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, do you quite believe in them, would you know themif you met them in the Paradise of Fiction? Noun one might recognise, but there is ahaziness about La Petite Fadette. Consuelo, let it be admitted, is not evanescent, oblivionscatters no poppy over her; but Madame Sand's later ladies, still more her men, are easilylost in the forests of fancy. Even their names with difficulty return to us, and if we read theroll-call, would Horace and Jacques cry Adsum like the good Colonel? There are livingcritics who have all Mr. George Meredith's heroines and heroes and oddities at their fingerends, and yet forget that musical name, like the close of a rich hexameter, Clare DoriaForey. 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 oneof her dignified later heroines, all self-renunciation and rural sentiment, preaching in vainto 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 SéraphitusSéraphita. Many of those are certain to live and keep their hold, but it is by dint of long andelaborate preparation, description, analysis. A stranger intermeddleth not with them, though we can fancy Lucien de Rubempré let loose in a country neighbourhood of GeorgeSand's, and making sonnets and love to some rural châtelaine, while Vautrin might strayamong the ruffians of Gaboriau, a giant of crime. Among M. Zola's people, however it mayfare with others, I find myself remembering few: the guilty Hippolytus of "La Curée," thepoor girl in "La Fortune des Rougon," the Abbé Mouret, the artist in "L'Oeuvre," and the halfidiotic girl of the farm house, and Hélène in "Un Page d'Amour." They are not amongst M.Zola's most prominent creations, and it must be some accident that makes them mostmemorable and recognisable to one of his readers.