To recur to Charles Dickens, is it generally known that his favorite novel of "David Copperfield" partially relates to the history of his own boyhood? The story of David's employment, when a child, in washing and labelling blacking-bottles in a London cellar, was true of Dickens himself. If it were possible to read between the lines, we should not infrequently find the most effective narrative sketches little less than biography or autobiography. Thackeray and Dickens both wrote under the thin gauze of fiction. "Vivian Gray" is but a photograph of its dilettante author; and every character drawn by Charlotte Bronté is a true portrait, all being confined within so small a circle as to be easily recognizable. Smollett sat for his own personality in that of Roderick Random; while Scott drew many of his most strongly individualized characters, like that of Dominie Sampson, from people in his immediate circle. Coleridge says of Milton: "In 'Paradise Lost,' indeed in every one of his poems, it is Milton himself whom you see. His Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve, are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives one the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works." It is well known that many of Byron's[61] poetical plots are almost literally his personal experiences. This was especially the case as to the "Giaour." A beautiful female slave was thrown into the sea for infidelity, and was terribly avenged by her lover, while Byron was in the East; being impressed with the dramatic character of the tragedy, he gave it expression in a poem. Carlyle says that Satan was Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model, apparently, of his conduct. In Bulwer-Lytton's "Disowned," one of his earliest and best stories, the hero, Clarence Linden, a youth of eighteen, while journeying as a pedestrian, makes the acquaintance of a free-and-easy person named Cole,--a gypsy king,--in whose camp he passes the night: all of which was an actual experience of Bulwer himself. Hans Christian Andersen gives us many of his personal experiences in his popular tale, "Only a Fiddler;" so is "Gilbert Gurney," a novel by Theodore Hook, a biography of himself as a practical joker. It will thus be seen that authors do not always draw entirely upon the imagination for incidents, characters, and plot, but that there is from first to last a large amount of actual truth in seeming fiction.