as the son of a general in the revolutionary army, and was
born, on the 23rd of July, 1806, at Villers Cotterets. He had hardly any
education; but, coming to Paris at the age of twenty, he was fortunate
enough to obtain a clerkship in the household of the Duke of Orleans. He
tried literature almost at once, and in 1829 his _Henri III. et sa Cour_
was played, and was a great success. This was a year before _Hernani_,
and though Dumas had no pretence to rival Hugo in literary merit, his
drama was quite as revolutionary in style, events, language, and general
arrangement as Hugo's. But he had not heralded it by any general
defiance, and it possessed (what his greater contemporary's dramatic
work never fully possessed) the indefinable knowledge of the stage and
its requirements, which always tells on an audience. After the
Revolution of July, the daring play of _Antony_ achieved an almost equal
success, despite its attacks on the proprieties, attacks of which at
that time French opinion was not tolerant in a serious play. Then he
returned to the historical drama in the _Tour de Nesle_, another play of
strong situations and reckless sacrifice of everything else to
excitement. After this Dumas published many plays, of which _Don Juan de
Marana_ and _Kean_ are perhaps the most extravagant, and _Mademoiselle
de Belle-Isle_, 1839, the best. But before long he fell into a train of
writing more profitable even than the drama. This was the composition of
historical romances something in Scott's manner. The most famous of
these, such as the _Three Musketeers_, _La Reine Margot_, and _Monte
Cristo_, were produced towards the latter part of the reign of Louis
Philippe, his early patron. He travelled a great deal, making books and
money out of his travels; and sometimes, as when he was the companion of
Garibaldi, finding himself in curious company. No man, probably, ever
made so much money by literature in France as Dumas, though he was not
equally skilled in keeping it. He died, in the midst of the disasters of
his country, on Christmas Eve, 1870. Dumas' literary position and
influence are not very easy to estimate, because of the strange extent
to which he carried what is called collaboration, and his frank avowal
of something very like plagiarism in many of the works which he wrote
unassisted. Endeavours have even been made to show that his most
celebrated works are the production of hack writers whom he paid to
write under his name.