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his back, then a layer of snow, then another layer of turf, and lastly a bundle of firewood, which they lighted, and thus improvised a moveable fire to warm them on their walk. All went well till the turf was dried and the fire reached poor Pierrot's back, when he set off braying, kicking, and rolling, till he rolled into an icy stream, where he lay for some hours; so as to be half frozen after being half roasted. Hence the combination of hydrophobia and pyrophobia which afflicted him.

Where Dumas erred and fell behind was in pushing to excess the failing with which Byron reproached Scott

'Let others spin their meagre brains for hire,
Enough for genius if itself inspire.'

He could not resist the temptation of making hay whilst the sun shone-of using his popularity as if, like the purse of Fortunatus, it had been inexhaustible-of overtasking his powers till, like the overtasked elephant, they proved unequal to the call. There was a period, near the end of his life, when Theodore Hook, besides editing a newspaper and a magazine, was (to use his own expression) driving three novels or stories abreast-in other words, contemporaneously composing them. Dumas boasts of having engaged for five at once; and the tradesmanlike manner in which he made his bargains was remarkable. M. Véron (the proprietor of the Constitutionel') came to me and said: "We are ruined if we do not publish, within eight days, an amusing, sparkling, interesting romance." "You require a volume that is 6000 lines, that is 135 pages of my writing. Here is paper; number and mark (paraphez) 135 pages.'

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Sued for non-performance of contract, and pleading his own cause, he magniloquently apostrophised the Court. The Academicians are Forty. Let them contract to supply you with eighty volumes in a year: they will make you bankrupt! Alone I have done what never man did before, nor ever will do again.' We need hardly add that the stipulated work was imperfectly and unequally done—

'Sunt bona, sunt mediocria, sunt mala plura.'

Du Halde is said to have composed his 'Description Géographique et Historique' of China without quitting Paris, and Dumas certainly wrote 'Quinze Jours au Sinai' and 'De Paris à Astracan,' without once setting foot in Asia. But most of his 'Impressions de Voyage,' in France, Italy, Spain, &c., were the results of actual travel; and his expedition to Algeria in a Government steamer, with a literary mission from the Government, gave rise to an animated debate in the Chamber of Deputies (February 10, 1847), in which he was rudely handled till M. de Salvandy

Salvandy (Minister of Public Instruction) came to the rescue, and, after justifying the mission, added-The same writer had received similar missions under administrations anterior to mine.' Dumas (we are assured) meditated a challenge to M. Leon de Malleville for injurious words spoken in this debate, and requested M. Viennet, as President of the Society of Men of Letters, to act as his friend. M. Viennet, after desiring the request to be reduced to writing, wrote a formal refusal, alleging that M. Dumas, having in some sort, before the civil tribunal of the Seine, abdicated the title of man of letters to assume that of marquis, had no longer a claim on the official head of the literary republic. Hereupon the meditated challenge was given up. The representation of 'Les Mohicans de Paris,' a popular drama brought out by Dumas in 1864, having been prohibited by the Censorship, he addressed and printed a spirited remonstrance to the Emperor:

'Sire,-There were in 1830, and there are still, three men at the head of French literature. These three men are Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and myself.

'Victor Hugo is proscribed; Lamartine is ruined. People cannot proscribe me like Hugo; there is nothing in my life, in my writings, or in my words, for proscription to fasten on. But they can ruin me like Lamartine; and in effect they are ruining me.

'I know not what ill-will animates the censorship against me. I have written and published twelve hundred volumes. It is not for me to appreciate them in a literary point of view. Translated into all languages, they have been as far as steam could carry them. Although I am the least worthy of the three, these volumes have made me, in the five parts of the world, the most popular of the three; perhaps because one is a thinker, the other a dreamer, and I am but a vulgariser (vulgarisateur).

Of these twelve hundred volumes, there is not one which may not be given to read to a workman of the Faubourg St. Antoine, the most republican, or to a young girl of the Faubourg St. Germain, the most modest, of all our faubourgs.'

His politics were never incendiary or dangerous in any way. They were always those of a moderate Republican, and he consistently adhered to them. His best romances rarely transgress against propriety, and are entirely free from that hard, cold, sceptical, materialist, illusion-destroying tone, which is so repelling in Balzac and many others of the most popular French novelists. But Dumas must have formed a strange notion of the young ladies of the noble Faubourg to suppose that they could sit out a representation of Antony' or Angèle' without a blush. After recapitulating the misdeeds of the imperial censorship and the enormous losses he had sustained, he concludes:

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'I appeal

I appeal, then, for the first time, and probably for the last, to the prince whose hand I had the honour to clasp at Arenenberg, at Ham, and at the Elysée, and who, having found me in the character of proselyte on the road of exile and on that of the prison, has never found me in the character of petitioner on the road of the Empire.'

The Emperor, who never turned a deaf ear on a proselyte or companion on either road, immediately caused the prohibition to be withdrawn. Amongst the many strange episodes of Dumas' adventurous and erratic career was his connection with Garibaldi, who made him Director of the Museum at Naples during the interregnum. The illness which ended with his death, brought on a complete paralysis of all his faculties, and he died towards the close of 1870, happily insensible to the hourly increasing disasters and humiliations of his country.

Occurring at a less anxious and occupied period, his death would have been commemorated as one of the leading events of the year, and it would hardly have been left to a foreign journal to pay the first earnest tribute to his memory. Take him for all in all, he richly merits a niche in the Temple of Fame; and what writer does not who has been unceasingly before the public for nearly half a century without once forfeiting his popularity? whose multifarious productions have been equally and constantly in request in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Calcutta, Sydney, and New York. Think of the amount of amusement and information he has diffused, the weary hours he has helped to while away, the despondency he has lightened, the sick-beds he has relieved, the gay fancies, the humourous associations, the inspiriting thoughts, we owe to him. To lie on a sofa and read eternal new novels of Marivaux and Crebillon, was the beau idéal, the day dream, of Gray, one of the finest and most fastidious minds of the eighteenth century; and what is there of Marivaux or Crebillon to compete in attractiveness with the wondrous fortunes of a Monte Christo or the chivalrous adventures of a D'Artagnan?

A title to fame, like a chain of proofs, may be cumulative. It may rest on the multiplicity and universality of production and capacity. Voltaire, for example, who symbolizes an age, produced no one work in poetry or prose that approximates to first rate in its kind, if we except 'Candide' and 'Zadig;' and their kind is not the first. Dumas must be judged by the same standard; as one who was at everything in the ring, whose foot was ever in the stirrup, whose lance was ever in the rest, who infused new life into the acting drama, indefinitely extended the domain of fiction, and (in his 'Impressions de Voyage') invented a new literature of the road. So judged-as he will be,

when

when French criticism shall raise its drooping head and have time to look about it-he will certainly take rank as one of the three or four most popular, influential, and gifted writers that the France of the nineteenth century has produced.

ART. VIII.-1. A Refutation of the Wage - Fund Theory of Modern Political Economy as enunciated by Mr. Mill, M.P., and Mr. Fawcett, M.P. By Francis D. Longe, Barrister-atLaw. London, 1866.

2. On Labour: Its Wrongful Claims and Rightful Dues; Its Actual Present and Possible Future. By William Thomas Thornton, Author of A Plea for Peasant Proprietors,' &c. Second Edition. London, 1870.

3. Pauperism: Its Causes and Remedies. By Henry Fawcett, M.A., M.P., Fellow of Trinity Hall, and Professor of Political Economy in the University of Cambridge. London, 1871.

4. Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries. A Series of Essays published under the Sanction of the Cobden Club. London, 1870.

5. Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England, and Continental Countries. By T. E. Cliffe Leslie, LL.B., of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister-at-Law, Examiner in Political Economy in the University of London, and Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy in the Queen's University in Ireland, and Queen's College, Belfast. London, 1870. 6. Programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association. With an Explanatory Statement by John Stuart Mill. London,

1871.

7. Trades' Unions Abroad, and Hints for Home Legislation, Reprinted from a Report on the Amsterdam Exhibition of Domestic Economy for the Working Classes. By the Hon. T. J. Hovell Thurlow. Second Edition. London, 1871.

We

E have no objection to Utopias frankly set forth as such, whether in prose or verse.* The ideal aim of one age may become the realized possession of an age following. Nor have we any objection to enthusiasm which knows itself, and knows the workday world. Without enthusiastic motive-power, no great moral or social enterprise was ever accomplished. But there is an Utopianism which counts its chickens before they

*See a rather remarkable lyrical effusion, entitled Labour's Utopia,' at p. 460 of Mr. Thornton's volume On Labour.'

are

are hatched, nay, cackles over chickens it expects to hatch from eggs that are addled. There is an enthusiasm which a writer before us, who yet avows himself an enthusiast, describes with great justice as follows:

The besetting sin of enthusiasts, and notably of enthusiastic philanthropists, is a proneness to anticipate events, a desire to legislate as if mankind were already what it is barely conceivable that they may become, and to force upon them institutions to which they can only be fitted by long ages of training, instead of beginning by endeavouring to educate them into fitness for the institutions.'*

This is excellent sense, and we could only have wished that all the Utopianisms of the writer, as well as those of all his fellow- enthusiasts' amongst contemporary economists, resembled the preceding extract in sobriety of sentiment and expression.

A former generation of political economists laid themselves more or less open to the charge of assigning to individual activity, exclusively occupied in the pursuit of wealth, the lion's share in the entire economy of nations. Thence in part the reaction which in these days we witness. Thence, in quarters where one would least have been prepared to look for them, the tendencies in a socialistic direction which have been very perceptible in some of the most remarkable economical publications of late

years.

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The school of political economists at present in the ascendant seem to have an implicit faith in legislative omnipotence, whenever it thinks fit to exert itself, to remodel all industrial and social relations in the supposed interest of the labouring classes. If Mr. Mill, the recognized leader of that school, is to be designated as an economical enthusiast'-or perhaps more properly as the founder and propagator of economic enthusiasm amongst the junior apostles of the philanthropic agrarianism he preaches (Mr. Thornton will scarcely rank as a junior, but rather as a senior prophet of that creed)- he has earned that designation more by the excessive exercise of the dialectical than of the imaginative faculty, and does not so much body forth to himself the forms of things unknown, as suggest to his disciples revolutions, unrealised even in imagination, of all existing relations between classes and sexes-as logically admissible, and not to be set aside as practically chimerical without actual experiment. His enthusiasm is the speculative passion of starting ever fresh game in the wide field of abstract social possibilities-philosophically indifferent to all objections drawn from the actual conditions

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