ouched seemed to turn to gold in his hands. No dramatist, hardly any
writer of our time, has accumulated such wealth. His annual income from
copyrights often reached $30,000, and he died worth nearly half a
million. He might well take for his crest a pen and panpipes, and the
motto "_Inde fortuna et libertas_" for he passed the latter years of his
life in wealth and ease in the palatial country-seat of Serincourt, over
whose door he inscribed the characteristic lines:--

Le theatre a paye cet asile champetre
Vous qui passez, merci! Je vous le dois peut-etre.

But as he had gained easily he spent liberally, and many stories tell of
his ingenious and delicate generosity.

Scribe's popularity has become a tradition, and his works have proved a
veritable bonanza to the dramatic magpies of every nation in Europe; but
among the French critics of the past generation he has found a very
grudging recognition. It was with a tone of aristocratic superiority
that Villemain welcomed him to the French Academy with the words: "The
secret of your dramatic prosperity is that you have happily seized the
spirit of your age and produced the kind of comedy to which it best
adapts itself, and which most resembles it." In the same tone Lanson
says that Scribe "offers to the middle class exactly the pleasure and
the ideal that it demands. It recognizes itself in his pieces, where
nothing taxes the intellect." Dumas _fils_ goes even further, and
compares him to the sleight-of-hand performer with his trick-cups and
thimble-rings, in whose performance one finds "neither an idea nor a
reflection, nor an enthusiasm, nor a hope, nor a remorse, nor disgust,
nor pleasure. One looked, listened, was puzzled, laughed, wept, passed
the evening, was amused. That was much, but one learned nothing at all."

These critics, and others too, fail to find in Scribe more than an
ingenious artisan, a purveyor to the public taste, and sometimes a
panderer to it. He has indeed no trace of the lofty purpose that
permeates the whole dramatic work of Dumas _fils_ and Augier, and
little careful study either of character or of manners. His style, too,
though almost always light and lively, is often slovenly and incorrect.
His mastery lies elsewhere, in his perfect command of the resources of
the stage, which he managed as no dramatist before or since has done,
except perhaps his spiritual child, Sardou, and also in his marvellously
dexterous handling of intrigu