e Cristo_
again.

It will be clear from these remarks that, whether rightly or wrongly, I
think Dumas happiest in his dealings with historical or quasi-historical
matters, these dealings being subject to the general law, given more
than once elsewhere, that the historical personages shall not, in their
historically registered and detailed character, occupy the chief
positions in the story. In other words, he seems to me to have preferred
an historical canvas and a few prominent figures outlined thereon--in
which respect he does not greatly differ from other historical novelists
so far as they are historical novelists merely. But Dumas, as a novelist
of French history, had at his disposal sources and resources, for
filling up his pictures, which were lacking elsewhere, and which, in
particular, English novelists possessed hardly at all, as regards
anything earlier than the eighteenth century. I dare say it has often
occurred to other people, as it has to me, how vastly different _Peveril
of the Peak_--one of the least satisfactory of Scott's novels--would
have been if Pepys's Diary had been published twenty years earlier
instead of two years later. Evelyn was available, but far less suitable
to the purpose, and was only published when Scott had begun to write
rather than to read.[319] For almost every year, certainly for every
decade and every notable person's life with which and with whom he
wished to deal, Dumas had "Memoirs" on to which, if he did not care to
take the trouble himself, he had only to turn one of the "young men" to
get facts, touches, ornaments, suggestions enough for twenty times his
own huge production. Of course other people had these same stores open
to them, and that other people did not make the same use thereof[320] is
one of the chief glories of Alexander the Great in fiction. But in any
real critical-historical estimate of him, the fact has to take its
place, and its very great place.

But there is the other fact, or collection of facts, of greater
importance still, implied in the question, "What did he do with these
stores?" and "How did he, as it seems to Alexandrians at least, do so
much better than those other people, to whom they were open quite as
freely?"

It is, however, before answering these questions at large, perhaps once
more necessary to touch on what may be called the historical-_accuracy_
objection. If anybody says, "The man represents Charles I. as having
been taken, after