on, who travelled a great deal, and who,
according to his enemies, devoted a great deal of time to relaxation,[313]
is not likely to have written all this enormous bulk himself, even
if it were physically possible for him to have done so. One may go
farther, and say that pure internal evidence shows that the whole was
_not_ written by the same person.

[Sidenote: The Collaborators?]

As for the actual collaborators--the "young men," as Thackeray
obligingly called them, who carried out the works in a less funereal
sense than that in which the other "young men" carried out Ananias and
Sapphira--that is a question on which I do not feel called upon to enter
at any length. Anybody who cannot resist curiosity on the point may
consult Alphonse Karr (who really might have found something fitter on
which to expend his energies); Querard, an ill-tempered bibliographer,
for whom there is the excuse that, except ill-temper, idleness, with a
particularly malevolent Satan to find work for its hands to do, or mere
hunger, hardly anything would make a man a bibliographer of his sort;
and the person whom the law called Jacquot, and he himself by the
handsomer title of Eugene de Mirecourt. Whether Octave Feuillet
exercised himself in this other kind before he took to his true line of
novels of society; whether that ingenious journalist M. Fiorentino also
played a part, are matters which who so lists may investigate. The most
dangerous competitor seems to be Auguste Maquet--the "Augustus MacKeat"
of the Romantic dawn--to whom some have even assigned the
_Mousquetaires_[314] bodily, as far as the novel adds to the Courtils de
Sandras "memoirs." But even with him, and still more with the others,
the good old battle-horse, which never fails one in this kind of
_chevauchee_, will be found to be effective in carrying the banner of
Alexander the Greatest safe through. How does it happen that in the
independent work of none of these, nor of any others, do the _special_
marks and merits of Dumas appear? How does it happen that these marks
and merits appear constantly and brilliantly in all the best work
assigned to Dumas, and more fitfully in almost all its vast extent?
There may be a good deal of apple in some plum-jam and perhaps some
vegetable-marrow. But plumminess is plumminess still, and it is the
plumminess of "Dumasity" which we are here to talk of, and that
only--the quality, not the man. And whether Dumas or Diabolus conceived
and b