Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/259

 neatly, to its end, and Cavagnac and Canolles, like La Mole and Coconnas, are worthy of a place not far below those famous friends-to-the-death, the Musketeers.

Dumas's admiration for the historical plays of Shakespeare was chiefly owing to the skill with which the dramatist fused history into fiction and fiction into history, so that only the most expert eye could tell where the one ended and the other began. The little novel, "Les Frères Corses," possesses this virtue. It is obviously, as its author asserts, the result of his travels in Corsica; but it is equally certain that the supernatural element is beyond the credible and actual. Although the story forms a strikingly dramatic episode it hardly possesses the merits to which its popularity in England would seem to entitle it. Dumas himself, though much given to staging his novels, never made a play of the "Frères Corses," but two or three different versions were played simultaneously in London, and the craze gave rise to various burlesques on the theme.

In the following year, 1846, Dumas's publishers issued a remarkable advertisement respecting our author, which Mr Fitzgerald asserts (without advancing proof) to be written by the novelist himself. It offers the public Dumas's works "in a new shape"