Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/369

 All these merits Dumas possesses in the highest degree; his invention moves within the limits of humanity, his characters are credible personages, neither monsters nor puppets."

"If his imagination was not of the highest quality," says Professor Bryce, "it was of almost unsurpassed fertility."

Mr Saintsbury, reflecting upon the charm which the romancer's books possess for him, is vaguely conscious of an abiding quality in what seems so slight, so fleeting in its nature:

"Dumas has the faculty, as no other novelist has, of presenting rapid and brilliant dioramas of the picturesque aspects of history, animating them with really human if not very intricately analysed passion, and connecting them with dialogue matchless of its kind. He cannot, as a rule, do much more than this, and to ask him for anything more is unreasonable, though in rare passages he rises to a much greater height. But he will absorb your attention and rest you from care and worry as hardly any other novelist will, and, unlike most novelists of his class, his pictures, at least the best of them, do not lose their virtue by rebeholding. I at least find 'The Three Musketeers' not less but more effectual for its purpose than I found it thirty, twenty, ten, even five years ago, and I think there must be something in work of such a virtue than