e allures one in regard to so
delightful an author as Dumas. He who had enriched so many died poor; he
who had told of conquering France, died during the Terrible Year. But he
could forgive, could appreciate, the valour of an enemy. Of the Scotch
at Waterloo he writes: "It was not enough to kill them: we had to push
them down." Dead, they still stood "shoulder to shoulder." In the same
generous temper an English cavalry officer wrote home, after Waterloo,
that he would gladly have given the rest of his life to have served, on
that day, in our infantry or in the French cavalry. These are the
spirits that warm the heart, that make us all friends; and to the great,
the brave, the generous Dumas we cry, across the years and across the
tomb, our _Ave atque vale_!

MR. STEVENSON'S WORKS

Perhaps the first quality in Mr. Stevenson's works, now so many and so
various, which strikes a reader, is the buoyancy, the survival of the
child in him. He has told the world often, in prose and verse, how vivid
are his memories of his own infancy. This retention of childish
recollections he shares, no doubt, with other people of genius: for
example, with George Sand, whose legend of her own infancy is much more
entertaining, and perhaps will endure longer, than her novels. Her
youth, like Scott's and like Mr. Stevenson's, was passed all in fantasy:
in playing at being some one else, in the invention of imaginary
characters, who were living to her, in the fabrication of endless
unwritten romances. Many persons, who do not astonish the world by their
genius, have lived thus in their earliest youth. But, at a given moment,
the fancy dies out of them: this often befalls imaginative boys in their
first year at school. "Many are called, few chosen"; but it may be said
with probable truth, that there has never been a man of genius in
letters, whose boyhood was not thus fantastic, "an isle of dreams." We
know how Scott and De Quincey inhabited airy castles; and Gillies tells
us, though Lockhart does not, that Scott, in manhood, was occasionally so
lost in thought, that he knew not where he was nor what he was doing.

The peculiarity of Mr. Stevenson is not only to have been a fantastic
child, and to retain, in maturity, that fantasy ripened into imagination:
he has also kept up the habit of dramatising everything, of playing, half
consciously, many parts, of making the world "an unsubstantial fairy
place." This turn of mind