themselves
dishonourable graves."

And the seeming ubiquity of the famous quadroon[8] is not more
marvellous than the multiplicity of characters he assumes. "Dumas at
Home and Abroad" offers an inexhaustible theme and a boundless field for
pen and pencil caricaturists. Alternately dramatist, novelist, tourist,
ambassador, the companion of princes, the manager of theatres, an
authority in courts of justice, a challenger of deputies, and shining
with equal lustre in these and fifty other capacities equally diverse,
what wonder that the slightest work flowing from the pen of so
remarkable a genius, though it be but a forgotten "trifle of twelve
thousand lines," is received with intense gratitude, and caught at like
manna by a famished multitude? Eugene Sue is another writer who has
taken the world by storm, but in quite a different fashion. The
ex-lieutenant of marine does not obtrude his personality upon public
notice, and relies more upon the powerful calibre of his guns than upon
their number. Two books, lengthy ones certainly, established his
reputation. He had been many years a cultivator of literature, and had
produced sundry romances of little more than average merit, when he
suddenly burst upon the public, in the widely spread _feuilleton_ of the
_Debats_, with a work which, however objectionable in some respects, is
unquestionably of extraordinary power and interest. Like the Pickwick
Papers, the "Mysteres de Paris" at once established their author in
popular estimation, not only in the land in whose language they were
written, but in all the reading countries of Europe. It was the opening
of a new vein in the literary mine, and though the metal might have been
purer, it had all the glitter that captivates the multitude. The "Juif
Errant," inferior to its predecessor, was scarcely less successful. Its
bitter attacks on the Jesuits, and the consequent anathemas fulminated
against it, with more zeal than wisdom, by certain of the French clergy,
doubtless contributed to its vogue. After Sue and Dumas, Balzac is (with
the exception, perhaps, of Madame Dudevant,) the best known, and most
read, out of France, of all the living French novelists. We hold him
much over-rated, but his great fertility, and the real excellence of a
few of his books, have made him a widely-spread reputation. His early
efforts were less successful than those of Sue; and his first thirty
volumes scarcely attained mediocrity. At last he made