Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/189

 passage in the "Mémoires" gives the lie to many jeers directed against the "great low-comedian" as his foes called him:

"Bad Latin scholar as I am, I have always adored Virgil; his compassion for the wandering exiles, his solemn pictures of death, his intuition of an unknown God, touched my heart supremely from the first; the melody of his verses ... had an especial charm for me, and I knew by heart whole passages of the 'Æneid. Unlike most scholars Dumas studied with enthusiasm, and he never forgot.

"Partly by diligence, partly by divination, Dumas had great knowledge," says M. de Bury. "Having received no early education, he set himself deliberately to repair the misfortune, filling in the gap by the thousand ideas which he gathered daily from conversation, from travel and from reading. History, travels, natural history, foreign literature—he read all, from the "Ramayana" to Shakespeare, Goëthe, Schiller, Thackeray, Dickens, Cooper, Scott, his admiration of literature ever increasing. Hugo delighted without influencing him, but Balzac had little attraction for Dumas, who didn't see human nature from that point of view."

As will readily be understood, the great realist and the great romanticist were at opposite poles of