e for inquisitiveness than for correct
breeding--one of those who, devoid of delicacy and reckless of rebuffs,
pry into every thing--took the liberty to question M. Dumas rather
closely concerning his genealogical tree.

"You are a quadroon, M. Dumas?" he began.

"I am, sir," quietly replied Dumas, who has sense enough not to be
ashamed of a descent he cannot conceal.

"And your father?"

"Was a mulatto."

"And your grandfather?"

"A negro," hastily answered the dramatist, whose patience was waning
fast.

"And may I inquire what your great-grandfather was?"

"An ape, sir," thundered Dumas, with a fierceness that made his
impertinent interrogator shrink into the smallest possible compass. "An
ape, sir--my pedigree commences where yours terminates."

The father of Alexander Dumas, the republican general of the same name,
was a mulatto, born in St Domingo, the son of a negress and of the white
Marquis de la Pailleterie. By what legitimatizing process the bend
sinister was erased, and the marquisate preserved, we have hitherto been
unable to ascertain.

BELISARIUS,--WAS HE BLIND?

[Transcriber's Note: Greek sections in this article are unclear and have
been transliterated to the best of my ability. The very unclear letters
have been replaced by an asterisk]

The name of Belisarius is more generally known through the medium of the
novel, the opera, and the print-shop than by the pages of history.
Procopius, Gibbon, and Lord Mahon have done less for his universal
popularity than some unknown Greek romancer or ballad-singer in the
middle ages. Our ideas of the hero are involuntarily connected with the
figure of a tall old man, clad in a ragged mantle, with a stout staff in
his left hand, and a platter to receive an obolus in his right,
accompanied by a fair boy grasping his tattered garments, and carefully
guiding his steps.

We shall now venture to investigate the relationship between the
Belisarius of romance, and the Belisarius of history; and we believe we
shall be able to prove that the historical hero died in full possession
of his sight several centuries before the birth of his blind namesake,
the hero of romance; that he was not more directly related to the
unfortunate sufferer, than our disreputable acquaintance Don Juan of the
opera, was to the gallant and presumptuous Don Juan of Austria, the hero
of Lepanto; and that in short, as we say in Scotland, there was no
connexion but the name. In