France has lately sent forth her poets in great force, to travel, and to
write travels. Delamartine, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and others,
have been forth in the high-ways and the high-seas, observing,
portraying, poetizing, romancing. The last-mentioned of these, M. Dumas,
a dramatist very ingenious in the construction of plots, and one who
tells a story admirably, has travelled quite in character. There is a
dramatic air thrown over all his proceedings, things happen as pat as if
they had been rehearsed, and he blends the novelist and tourist together
after a very bold and original fashion. It is a new method of writing
travels that he has hit upon, and we recommend it to the notice of our
countrymen or countrywomen, who start from home with the fixed idea,
happen what may, of inditing a book. He does not depend altogether upon
the incidents of the road, or the raptures of sight-seeing, or any odd
fantasy that buildings or scenery may be kind enough to suggest: he
provides himself with full half of his materials before he starts, in
the shape of historical anecdote and romantic story, which he
distributes as he goes along. A better plan for an amusing book could
not be devised. Your mere tourist, it must be confessed, however
frivolous he submits for our entertainment to become, grows heavy on our
hands; that rapid and incessant change of scene which is kindly meant to
enliven our spirits, becomes itself wearisome, and we long for some
resting-place, even though it should be obtained by that most
illegitimate method of closing the volume. On the other hand, a teller
of tales has always felt the want of some enduring thread--though, as
some one says in a like emergency, it be only _packthread_--on which his
tales may be strung--something to fill up the pauses, and prevent the
utter solution of continuity between tale and tale--something that gives
the narrator a reasonable plea for _going on again_, and makes the
telling another story an indispensable duty upon his part, and the
listening to it a corresponding obligation upon ours; and ever since the