Whereby I only mean that such seafaring was illicit in those aureate
days when, Cleveland being consul for the second time, your
geography figured as the screen of fictive reading-matter during
school-hours.

One need not say that there is no question, in either case, of
"imitation," far less of "plagiarism"; nor need one, surely, point
out the impossibility of anybody's ever mistaking the present book
for a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Ere Homer's eyesight began not to be
what it had been, the fact was noted by the observant Chian, that
very few sane architects commence an edifice by planting and rearing
the oaks which are to compose its beams and stanchions. You take
over all such supplies ready hewn, and choose by preference time-
seasoned timber. Since Homer's prime a host of other great creative
writers have recognised this axiom when they too began to build: and
"originality" has by ordinary been, like chess and democracy, a
Mecca for little minds.

Besides, there is the vast difference that M. Anatole France has
introduced into the Dumas theatre some preeminently un-Dumas-like
stage-business: the characters, between assignations and combats,
toy amorously with ideas. That is the difference which at a stroke
dissevers them from any helter-skelter character in Dumas as utterly
as from any of our clearest thinkers in office.

It is this toying, this series of mental _amourettes_, which
incommunicably "makes the difference" in almost all the volumes of
M. France familiar to me, but our affair is with this one story. Now
in this vivid book we have our fill of color and animation and
gallant strangenesses, and a stir of characters who impress us as