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This etext was prepared from the 1891 Henry and Co. edition by David
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Essays in Little
by Andrew Lang

Contents:
Preface Alexandre Dumas Mr. Stevenson's works Thomas Haynes
Bayly Theodore de Banville Homer and the Study of Greek The Last
Fashionable Novel Thackeray Dickens Adventures of Buccaneers The
Sagas Charles Kingsley Charles Lever: His books, adventures and
misfortunes The poems of Sir Walter Scott John Bunyan To a Young
Journalist Mr. Kipling's stories

PREFACE

Of the following essays, five are new, and were written for this volume.
They are the paper on Mr. R. L. Stevenson, the "Letter to a Young
Journalist," the study of Mr. Kipling, the note on Homer, and "The Last
Fashionable Novel." The article on the author of "Oh, no! we never
mention Her," appeared in the New York Sun, and was suggested by
Mr. Dana, the editor of that journal. The papers on Thackeray and
Dickens were published in Good Words, that on Dumas appeared in
Scribner's Magazine, that on M. Theodore de Banville in The New
Quarterly Review. The other essays were originally written for a
newspaper "Syndicate." They have been re-cast, augmented, and, to a
great extent, re-written.
A. L.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

Alexandre Dumas is a writer, and his life is a topic, of which his
devotees never weary. Indeed, one lifetime is not long enough wherein
to tire of them. The long days and years of Hilpa and Shalum, in
Addison--the antediluvian age, when a picnic lasted for half a century
and a courtship for two hundred years, might have sufficed for an
exhaustive study of Dumas. No such study have I to offer, in the brief
seasons of our perishable days. I own that I have not read, and do not,
in the circumstances, expect to read, all of Dumas, nor even the greater
part of his thousand volumes. We only dip a cup in that sparkling
spring, and drink, and go on,--we cannot hope to exhaust the fountain,
nor to carry away with us the well itself. It is but a word of gratitude
and delight that we can say to the heroic and indomitable master, only
an ave of friendship that we can call across the bourne to the shade of
the Porthos of fiction. That his works (his best works) should be even
still more widely circulated than they are; that the young should read
them, and learn frankness, kindness, generosity--should esteem the
tender heart, and the gay, invincible wit; that the old should read them
again, and find forgetfulness of trouble, and taste the anodyne of
dreams, that is what we desire.
Dumas said of himself ("Memoires," v. 13) that when he was young he
tried several times to read forbidden books--books that are sold sous le
manteau. But he never got farther than the tenth page, in the

"scrofulous French novel On gray paper with blunt type;"
he never made his way so far as
"the woful sixteenth print."
"I had, thank God, a natural sentiment of delicacy; and thus, out of my
six hundred volumes (in 1852) there are not four which the most
scrupulous mother may not give to her daughter." Much later, in 1864,
when the Censure threatened one of his plays, he wrote to the Emperor:
"Of my twelve hundred volumes there is not one which a girl in our
most modest quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, may not be allowed
to read." The mothers of the Faubourg, and mothers in general, may not
take Dumas exactly at his word. There is a passage, for example, in the
story of Miladi ("Les Trois Mousquetaires") which a parent or guardian
may well think undesirable reading for youth. But compare it with the
original passage in the "Memoires" of D'Artagnan! It has