mythology. He knew all about Jupiter--like David Copperfield's Tom
Jones, "a child's Jupiter, an innocent creature"--all about every
god, goddess, fawn, dryad, nymph--and he never forgot this useful
information. Dear Lempriere, thou art superseded; but how much more
delightful thou art than the fastidious Smith or the learned
Preller! Dumas had one volume of the "Arabian Nights," with
Aladdin's lamp therein, the sacred lamp which he was to keep burning
with a flame so brilliant and so steady. It is pleasant to know
that, in his boyhood, this great romancer loved Virgil. "Little as
is my Latin, I have ever adored Virgil: his tenderness for exiles,
his melancholy vision of death, his foreboding of an unknown God,
have always moved me; the melody of his verses charmed me most, and
they lull me still between asleep and awake." School days did not
last long: Madame Dumas got a little post--a licence to sell
tobacco--and at fifteen Dumas entered a notary's office, like his
great Scotch forerunner. He was ignorant of his vocation for the
stage--Racine and Corneille fatigued him prodigiously--till he saw
Hamlet: Hamlet diluted by Ducis. He had never heard of
Shakespeare, but here was something he could appreciate. Here was
"a profound impression, full of inexplicable emotion, vague desires,
fleeting lights, that, so far, lit up only a chaos."

Oddly enough, his earliest literary essay was the translation of
Burger's "Lenore." Here, again, he encounters Scott; but Scott
translated the ballad, and Dumas failed. Les mortes vont vite! the
same refrain woke poetry in both the Frenchman and the Scotchman.


"Ha! ha! the Dead can ride with speed:
Dost fear to ride with me?"