ry, which he
distributes as he goes along. A better plan for an amusing book could
not be devised. Your mere tourist, it must be confessed, however
frivolous he submits for our entertainment to become, grows heavy on our
hands; that rapid and incessant change of scene which is kindly meant to
enliven our spirits, becomes itself wearisome, and we long for some
resting-place, even though it should be obtained by that most
illegitimate method of closing the volume. On the other hand, a teller
of tales has always felt the want of some enduring thread--though, as
some one says in a like emergency, it be only _packthread_--on which his
tales may be strung--something to fill up the pauses, and prevent the
utter solution of continuity between tale and tale--something that gives
the narrator a reasonable plea for _going on again_, and makes the
telling another story an indispensable duty upon his part, and the
listening to it a corresponding obligation upon ours; and ever since the
time when that young lady of unpronounceable and unrememberable name
told the One Thousand and One Tales, telling a fragment every morning to
keep her head upon her shoulders, there has been devised many a strange
expedient for this purpose. Now, M. Dumas has contrived, by uniting the
two characters of tourist and novelist, to make them act as reliefs to
each other. Whilst he shares with other travellers the daily adventures
of the road--the journey, the sight, and the dinner--he is not compelled
to be always moving; he can pause when he pleases, and, like the
_fableur_ of olden times, sitting down in the market-place, in the
public square, at the corner of some column or statue, he narrates his
history or his romance. Then, the story told, up starts the busy and
provident tourist; lo! the _voiture_ is waiting for him at the hotel; in
he leaps, and we with him, and off we rattle through other scenes, and
to other cities. He has a track _in space_ to which he is bound; we
recognize the necessity that he should proceed thereon; but he can
diverge at pleasure through all _time_, bear us off into what age he
pleases, make us utterly oblivious of the present, and lap us in the
Elysium of a good story.

With a book written palpably for the sole and most amiable purpose of
amusement, and succeeding in this purpose, how should we deal? How but
receive it with a passive acquiescence equally amiable, content solely
to be amused, and giving all severer criticism