these ingenious men ever produced, by himself, anything that could be mistaken for the work of the master. All his good things have the same stamp and the same spirit, which we find nowhere else. Again, nobody contests his authorship of his own 'Memoirs,' or of his book about his dogs, birds, and other beasts-The Story of My Pets.' Now, the merit of these productions is, in kind, identical with many of the merits of his best novels. There is the same goodhumor, gayety, and fullness of life. We may therefore read Dumas's central romances without much fear of being grateful to the wrong person. Against the modern theory that the Iliad and Odyssey are the work of many hands in many ages, we can urge that these supposed "hands" never did anything nearly so good for themselves; and the same argument applies in the case of Alexandre Dumas.

A brief sketch of his life must now be given. "No man has had so many of his possessions disputed as myself," says Dumas. Not only his right to his novels, but his right to his name and to legitimate birth, was contested. Here we shall follow his own account of himself in his Memoirs,' which do not cover nearly the whole of his life. Alexandre Dumas was born at Villers-Cotterets-sur-Aisne, on July 24th, 1803(?). He lived to almost exactly the threescore and ten years of the Psalmist. He saw the fall of Napoleon, the restoration of the rightful king, the expulsion of the Legitimate monarch in 1830, the Orleans rule, its overthrow in 1848, the Republic, the Empire, and the Terrible Year, 1870-1871. Then he died, in the hour of the sorrow of his

"Immortal and indomitable France.»

Dumas's full name was noble: he was Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie. His family estate, La Pailleterie, was made a marquisate by Louis XIV. in 1707. About 1760 the grandfather of Dumas sold his lands in France, and went to Hayti. There in 1762 was born his father, son of Louise Cossette Dumas and of the Marquis de la Pailleterie. The mother must have been a woman of color; Dumas talks of his father's "mulatto hue," and he himself had undoubted traces of African blood. Yet it appears that the grandparents were duly married. In 1772, his wife having died, the old marquis returned to France. The Revolution broke out, and the father of Alexandre Dumas fought in the armies of the Republic. The cruel mob called him by way of mockery, "Monsieur Humanity," because he endeavored to rescue the victims of their ferocity. He was a man of great courage and enormous physical strength. Napoleon, in honor of one of his feats of arms, called him in a dispatch "The Horatius Cocles of the Republic." He was with Napoleon in