victims were Casimir Delavigne, Scribe, and Ponsard. On each
occasion Dumas declares that, after reflecting, he saw that he was
moved by a little personal pique, not by a disinterested love of
art. He makes his confession with a rare nobility of candour; and
yet his review of Ponsard is worthy of him. M. Ponsard, who, like
Dumas, was no scholar, wrote a play styled Ulysse, and borrowed from
the Odyssey. Dumas follows Ponsard, Odyssey in hand, and while he
proves that the dramatist failed to understand Homer, proves that he
himself was, in essentials, a capable Homeric critic. Dumas
understands that far-off heroic age. He lives in its life and
sympathises with its temper. Homer and he are congenial; across the
great gulf of time they exchange smiles and a salute.

"Oh! ancient Homer, dear and good and noble, I am minded now and
again to leave all and translate thee--I, who have never a word of
Greek--so empty and so dismal are the versions men make of thee, in
verse or in prose."

How Dumas came to divine Homer, as it were, through a language he
knew not, who shall say? He DID divine him by a natural sympathy of
excellence, and his chapters on the "Ulysse" of Ponsard are worth a
wilderness of notes by learned and most un-Homeric men. For,
indeed, who can be less like the heroic minstrel than the academic
philologist?

This universality deserves note. The Homeric student who takes up a
volume of Dumas at random finds that he is not only Homeric
naturally, but that he really knows his Homer. What did he nor
know? His rapidity in reading must have been as remarkable as his
pace with the pen. As M. Blaze de Bury says: "Instinct,