it not accomplish? Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a
super-human burden; but your imaginative strength never found a task
too great for it. What an extraordinary vigour, what health, what
an overflow of force was yours! It is good, in a day of small and
laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and
dwell in the company of Dumas's men--so gallant, so frank, so
indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen. Like M. de
Rochefort in "Vingt Ans Apres," like that prisoner of the Bastille,
your genius "n'est que d'un parti, c'est du parti du grand air."

There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and
enjoyment; in that current of strength not only your characters
live, frolic, kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators
were animated by the virtue which went out of you. How else can we
explain it, the dreary charge which feeble and envious tongues have
brought against you, in England and at home? They say you employed
in your novels and dramas that vicarious aid which, in the slang of
the studio, the "sculptor's ghost" is fabled to afford.

Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint
and impotent as "the strengthless tribes of the dead" in Homer's
Hades, before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a
momentary valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality
that these collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and
when they parted from you they shuddered back into their
nothingness. Where are the plays, where the romances which Maquet
and the rest wrote in their own strength? They are forgotten with
last year's snows; they have passed into the wide waste-paper basket
of the world. You say of D'Artagnan, when severed from his three
friends--from Porthos, Athos, and Aramis--"he felt that he could do