" Neither Scott nor Dumas could shut his ears to a prayer or
his pockets to a beggar, or his doors on whoever knocked at them.
"I might at least have asked him to dinner," Scott was heard
murmuring, when some insufferable bore at last left Abbotsford,
after wasting his time and nearly wearing out his patience. Neither
man PREACHED socialism; both practised it on the Aristotelian
principle: the goods of friends are common, and men are our
friends.
The death of Dumas' father, while the son was a child, left Madame
Dumas in great poverty at Villers Cotterets. Dumas' education was
sadly to seek. Like most children destined to be bookish, he taught
himself to read very young: in Buffon, the Bible, and books of
mythology. He knew all about Jupiter--like David Copperfield's Tom
Jones, "a child's Jupiter, an innocent creature"--all about every
god, goddess, fawn, dryad, nymph--and he never forgot this useful
information. Dear Lempriere, thou art superseded; but how much more
delightful thou art than the fastidious Smith or the learned
Preller! Dumas had one volume of the "Arabian Nights," with
Aladdin's lamp therein, the sacred lamp which he was to keep burning
with a flame so brilliant and so steady. It is pleasant to know
that, in his boyhood, this great romancer loved Virgil. "Little as
is my Latin, I have ever adored Virgil: his tenderness for exiles,
his melancholy vision of death, his foreboding of an unknown God,
have always moved me; the melody of his verses charmed me most, and
they lull me still between asleep and awake.
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