Very few artists succeed in the delineation of life without living models; but no good one servilely will betray the forms they rather get hints from than actually copy.

Thus though I sketched Roger Acton from one Robert Tunnel, an Albury labourer, and took the cottage near Postford Pond as his home,--adding thereto Mr.Campion's park and house at Danney, near Hurst (I was then living at Brighton) as the model for Sir John Vincent's estate,--as well as Grace, Ben Burke, and so on from persons I had seen,--I need not say that my sketches from nature were but outlines to my finished work of art.

Simon Jennings, however, is an exact portrait of a man I knew at Brighton.

So also with these tales, and others of my writings." About "The Twins" a curious and somewhat awkward coincidence happened, in the fact that my totally ideal characters of General Tracey and his family were supposed to be intended for some persons whom the cap (it seems) fitted pretty accurately, and who then lived at the southern watering-place I had too diaphanously depicted as Burleigh-Singleton.

It is somewhat dangerous to invent blindly.