the cast-off clothes of history,
the wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of
Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no
more than a room in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move
the soul with the last degree of terror and of pity.'

The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame--for a
moment. The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when 'La
Curee and 'Pot-Bouille are more forgotten than 'Le Grand Cyrus,' men
and women--and, above all, boys--will laugh and weep over the page
of Alexandre Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our
childhood. I remember a very idle little boy who was busy with the
'Three Musketeers' when he should have been occupied with 'Wilkins's
Latin Prose.' 'Twenty years after' (alas and more) he is still constant
to that gallant company; and, at this very moment, is breathlessly
wondering whether Grimand will steal M. de Beaufort out of the
Cardinal's prison.

XIII. To Theocritus

'Sweet, methinks, is the whispering sound of yonder pine-tree,' so,
Theocritus, with that sweet word _ade_*, didst thou begin and strike the
keynote of thy songs. 'Sweet,' and didst thou find aught of sweet, when
thou, like thy Daphnis, didst 'go down the stream, when the whirling
wave closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the
Nymphs?' Perchance below those waters of death thou didst find, like
thine own Hylas, the lovely Nereids waiting thee, Eunice, and Malis,
and Nycheia with her April eyes. In the House of Hades, Theocritus, doth
there dwell aught that is fair, and can the low light on the fields
of asphodel make thee forget thy Sicily? Nay, methinks thou hast not
forgotten, and perchance for poets dead there is prepared a place more
beautiful than their dreams. It was well for the later minstrels of
another day, it was well for Ronsard and Du Bellay to desire a dim
Elysium of their own, where the sunlight comes faintly through the
shadow of the earth, where the poplars are duskier, and the waters more
pale than in the meadows of Anjou.

* Transliterated.

There, in that restful twilight, far remote from war and plot, from
sword and fire, and from religions that sharpened the steel and lit the
torch, there these learned singers would fain have wandered with their
learned ladies, satiated with life and in love with an unearthly quiet.
But to thee, Theocritus, no twilight of t