Kipling, the note on Homer, and
"The Last Fashionable Novel." The article on the author of "Oh, no!
we never mention Her," appeared in the New York Sun, and was
suggested by Mr. Dana, the editor of that journal. The papers on
Thackeray and Dickens were published in Good Words, that on Dumas
appeared in Scribner's Magazine, that on M. Theodore de Banville in
The New Quarterly Review. The other essays were originally written
for a newspaper "Syndicate." They have been re-cast, augmented,
and, to a great extent, re-written.
A. L.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Alexandre Dumas is a writer, and his life is a topic, of which his
devotees never weary. Indeed, one lifetime is not long enough
wherein to tire of them. The long days and years of Hilpa and
Shalum, in Addison--the antediluvian age, when a picnic lasted for
half a century and a courtship for two hundred years, might have
sufficed for an exhaustive study of Dumas. No such study have I to
offer, in the brief seasons of our perishable days. I own that I
have not read, and do not, in the circumstances, expect to read, all
of Dumas, nor even the greater part of his thousand volumes. We
only dip a cup in that sparkling spring, and drink, and go on,--we
cannot hope to exhaust the fountain, nor to carry away with us the
well itself. It is but a word of gratitude and delight that we can
say to the heroic and indomitable master, only an ave of friendship
that we can call across the bourne to the shade of the Porthos of
fiction.
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