perpetual chase of something for the book. They bag an incident with as
much glee as a sportsman his first bird in September. They are out on
pleasure, but manifestly they have their task too; it is not quite
holiday, only half-holiday with them. The prospect or the picture gives
no pleasure till it has suggested the appropriate expression of
enthusiasm, which, once safely deposited in the note-book, the
enthusiasm itself can be quietly indulged in, or permitted to evaporate.
At the dinner-table, even when champagne is circulating, if a jest or a
story falls flat, they see with an Aristotelian precision the cause of
its failure, and how an additional touch, or a more auspicious moment,
would have procured for it a better fate; they stop to pick it up, they
clean it, they revolve the chapter and the page to which it shall lend
its lustre. Nay, it is noticeable, that without much labour from the
polisher, many a dull thing in conversation has made a good thing in
print; the conditions of success are so different. Now, from all such
toils and perplexities M. Dumas is evidently free; free as the wildest
Oxonian who flies abroad in the mere wanton prodigality of spirits and
of purse. His book is made, or can be made, when he chooses: fortune
favours the bold, and incidents will always dispose themselves
dramatically to the dramatist.

Our traveller opens his campaign at Nice. It may be observed that M.
Dumas cannot be accused, like the present minister of his country, of
any partiality to the English; if the mortifying truth must be told, he
has no love of us at all; to which humour, so long as he delivers
himself of it with any wit or pleasantry, he is heartily welcome. Our
first extract will be thought, perhaps, to taste of this humour; but we
quote it for the absurd proof it affords of the manner in which we
English have overflooded some portions of the Continent:--