he Hours to the brim
with activity and adventure. His career was one of unparalleled
production, punctuated by revolutions, voyages, exiles, and other
intervals of repose. The tales he tells of his prowess in 1830, and with
Garibaldi, seem credible to me, and are borne out, so far, by the
narrative of M. Maxime Ducamp, who met him at Naples, in the Garibaldian
camp. Like Mr. Jingle, in "Pickwick," he "banged the field-piece,
twanged the lyre," and was potting at the foes of the republic with a
double-barrelled gun, when he was not composing plays, romances, memoirs,
criticisms. He has told the tale of his adventures with the Comedie
Francaise, where the actors laughed at his _Antony_, and where Madame
Mars and he quarrelled and made it up again. His plays often won an
extravagant success; his novels--his great novels, that is--made all
Europe his friend. He gained large sums of money, which flowed out of
his fingers, though it is said by some that his Abbotsford, Monte Cristo,
was no more a palace than the villa which a retired tradesman builds to
shelter his old age. But the money disappeared as fast as if Monte
Cristo had really been palatial, and worthy of the fantasy of a Nero. He
got into debt, fled to Belgium, returned, founded the _Mousquetaire_, a
literary paper of the strangest and most shiftless kind. In "Alexandre
Dumas a la Maison d'Or," M. Philibert Audebrand tells the tale of this
Micawber of newspapers. Everything went into it, good or bad, and the
name of Dumas was expected to make all current coin. For Dumas,
unluckily, was as prodigal of his name as of his gold, and no reputation
could bear the drafts he made on his celebrity. His son says, in the
preface to _Le Fils Naturel_: "Tragedy, dramas, history, romance, comedy,
travel, you cast all of them in the furnace and the mould of your brain,
and you peopled the world of fiction with new creations. The newspaper,
the book, the theatre, burst asunder, too narrow for your puissant
shoulders; you fed France, Europe, America with your works; you made the
wealth of publishers, translators, plagiarists; printers and copyists
toiled after you in vain. In the fever of production you did not always
try and prove the metal which you employed, and sometimes you tossed into
the furnace whatever came to your hand. The fire made the selection:
what was your own is bronze, what was not yours vanished in smoke."

The simile is noble and worthy of the Cycl