genius of Walter Scott, followed in France by Alexandre Dumas _père_.
These two great writers had numerous followers and imitators in all
countries, and every nation can point out some more or less successful
writer in that field, but who never attained the great success of
Sienkiewicz, whose works are translated into many languages, even
into Russian, where the antipathy for the Polish superior degree of
civilization is still very eager.

The superiority of Sienkiewicz's talent is then affirmed by this fact
of translation, and I would dare say that he is superior to the father
of this kind of novels, on account of his historical coloring, so much
emphasized in Walter Scott. This important quality in the historical
novel is truer and more lively in the Polish writer, and then he
possesses that psychological depth about which Walter Scott never
dreamed. Walter Scott never has created such an original and typical
figure as Zagloba is, who is a worthy rival to Shakespeare's Falstaff.
As for the description of duelings, fights, battles, Sienkiewicz's
fantastically heroic pen is without rival.

Alexandre Dumas, notwithstanding the biting criticism of Brunetière,
will always remain a great favorite with the reading masses, who are
searching in his books for pleasure, amusement, and distraction.
Sienkiewicz's historical novels possess all the interesting qualities
of Dumas, and besides that they are full of wholesome food for
thinking minds. His colors are more shining, his brush is broader,
his composition more artful, chiselled, finished, better built, and
executed with more vigor. While Dumas amuses, pleases, distracts,
Sienkiewicz astonishes, surprises, bewitches. All uneasy
preoccupations, the dolorous echoes of eternal problems, which
philosophical doubt imposes with the everlasting anguish of the