Alexandre Dumas describes himself, when inventing the plan of a work, as lying silent on his back for two whole days on the deck of a yacht in a Mediterranean port.  At the end of the two days he arose and called for dinner.  In those two days he had built his plot.  He had moulded a mighty clay, to be cast presently in perennial brass.  The chapters, the characters, the incidents, the combinations were all arranged in the artist’s brain ere he set a pen to paper.  My Pegasus won’t fly, so as to let me survey the field below me.  He has no wings, he is blind of one eye certainly, he is restive, stubborn, slow; crops a hedge when he ought to be galloping, or gallops when he ought to be quiet.  He never will show off when I want him.  Sometimes he goes at a pace which surprises me.  Sometimes, when I most wish him to make the running, the brute turns restive, and I am obliged to let him take his own time.  I wonder do other novel-writers experience this fatalism?  They must go a certain way, in spite of themselves.  I have been surprised at the observations made by some of my characters.  It seems as if an occult Power was moving the pen.  The personage does or says something, and I ask, how the dickens did he come to think of that?  Every man has remarked in dreams, the vast dramatic power which is sometimes evinced; I won’t say the surprising power, for nothing does surprise you in dreams.  But those strange characters you meet make instant observations of which you never can have thought previously.  In like manner, the imagination foretells things.  We spake anon of the inflated style of some writers.  What also if there is an AFFLATED style,—­when a writer is like a Pythoness on her oracle tripod, and mighty words, words which he cannot help, come blowing, and bellowing, and whistling, and moaning through the speaking pipes of his bodily organ?  I have told you it was a very queer shock to me the other day when, with a letter of introduction in his hand, the artist’s (not my) Philip Firmin walked into this room, and sat down in the chair opposite.  In the novel of “Pendennis,” written ten years ago, there is an account of a certain Costigan, whom I had invented (as I suppose authors invent their personages out of scraps, heel-taps, odds and ends of characters).  I was smoking in a tavern parlor one night—­and this Costigan came into the room alive—­the very man:—­the most remarkable resemblance of the printed sketches of the man, of the rude drawings in which I had depicted him.  He had the same little coat, the same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle in that eye.  “Sir,” said I, knowing him to be an old friend whom I had met in unknown regions, “sir,” I said, “may I offer you a glass of brandy-and-water?” “Bedad, ye may,” says he, “and I’ll sing ye a song tu.”  Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue.  Of course he had been in the army.  In ten minutes he pulled out an Army Agent’s account, whereon his name was written.