but it is not a good specimen. Two men who have
determined on suicide--one by shooting, one by hanging--meet at the same
tree in the Bois de Boulogne and wrangle about possession of the spot,
till the aspirant to suspension _per coll._ recounts his history from
the branch on which he is perched. After which an unlucky thirdsman,
interfering, gets shot, and buried _as_ one of the others--"which is
witty, let us 'ope," as the poetical historian of the quarrel between
Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Buchanan observes of something else.[369] As the
book begins with two attempted and disappointed suicides, so it ends
with two accomplished ones. A great part, and not the least readable, is
occupied by a certain English Countess of Lindsay (for Dumas the
younger, like Crebillon the younger, commits these _scandala magnatum_
with actual titles). The hero is rather a fool, and not much less of a
knave than he should be. His somewhat better wife is an innocent
bigamist, thinking him dead; and one of the end-suicides is that of her
second husband, who, finding himself _de trop_, benevolently makes way.
As for the parrot, he nearly spoils the story at the beginning by
"_singing_" (which I never heard a parrot do), and atones at the end by
getting poisoned without deserving it. I am afraid I must call it a
rather silly book.

It does not, however, lack the cleverness with which silliness,
especially in the young _and_ the old, is often associated, and so does
not break the assignment of that quality to its author. All these five
books were produced (with others) in a very few years, by a man who was
scarcely over twenty when he began and was not thirty when he wrote the
last of them. Now people sometimes write wonderful poetry when they are
very young, because, after all, a poet is not much more than a
mouthpiece of the Divine, whose spirit bloweth where it listeth. But it
is not often that they write thoroughly good novels till, like other
personages who have to wait for their "overseership" up to thirty, they
have had time and opportunity roughly to scan and sample life. There is,
in this work of Alexander the younger, plenty of imitation, of
convention, of that would-be knowingness which is the most amusing form
of ignorance, etc., etc. But there is a good deal more: and especially
there is plenty of the famous _diable au corps_, of _verve_, of "go," of
refusal to be content with one rut and one model. And all this came
once, even at this