The prize went to one M. Mouzin, but to our thinking, the one signed G. Dorval not only makes easy use of the boutsrimés, but contains an ingenious and comprehensive eulogy of Dumas himself. We translate it as a literary curio, without attempting to make English verse of it:

Dumas is subtle, kindly, and charming as a woman;

His genius created Kean and Catilina;
All who love him do so with heart and soul,
For his brilliant wit never plays truant.
King of jesters, with words he truly can
juggle:

He pictures Pitou for us, the good citoyen,
And d'Artagnan, who bravely clipped the

wings

Of Richelieu, the priest with soul of pagan.
His supple talent, rich and ripe as plum,
In a most moving tale showed Mirabeau,
And bade us hear his voice so grand, so sweet,
Illuminating all minds like a torch.

In lines of beauty carved he, too, Orestie,
For in that play he wrought the heart of
Gabrio,

The skill of Méry, wit and repartee,
Of which he stands the king, sans aid or
premium.

One reads his books as one would eat a fig,
A cream-tart or a slice of tasty pheasant;
Be 't a romance of days of Fronde or Ligue,
Or how to make a dish with parmesan;
For he knows all: the modest table-nut
Inspires his pow'rs as quickly as a pâté,
And he can paint you a demure grisette
As truly as a queen-or beaten ass!

THE WHITES AND THE BLUES

The accompanying illustration from the Chronique Illustré of twenty-five years ago is à propos of Les Blancs et les Bleus, the aging dramatist's last play, taken from his last romance. We reproduce here the most effective tableau of the drama, in which the young Royalist heroine, forced by a Republican Terrorist, who has just arrived in the city, to marry him as the price of her father's life, makes a sudden frantic appeal to St. Just, a member of the Government, pleading successfully for justice and pity. At the same time Le Monde pour Rire published an only too significant cartoon

respecting the play. A stage failure, in the slang of the Parisian stage, is called a four (oven), and Dumas is depicted as about to populate the Chatelet Theatre's oven with his figures, painted blue and white, the while d'Artagnan (his thenexistent journal) is praying for the poor damned!

The unveiling of the Doré statue of the romancer in 1883 called forth many interesting articles never republished, and, therefore, unknown, by "the maestro's" old assistants and friends. In an old copy of the Univers Illustré there is a paragraph in the "leader" which gives one a vivid idea of the Herculean task which Dumas was wont to accomplish at the height of his fame of

course, with the help of the invaluable Maquet:

LITERARY CREDITORS

There were mornings when Dumas, opening his letter-bag, would find, let us say, a letter from Dr. Véron, asking for the fifth volume of The Lady of Monsoreau for the Constitutional; one from M. Lefloch, requesting the fourth volume of The War of Women for the Patrie; one from M. Bertin, clamouring for the fifteenth volume of Monte Cristo for the Journal des Debats; one from M. Considerant on behalf of the Démocratie Pacifique, begging for the fifth volume of the Chevalier de Maison Rouge; another from M. Zabban, desiring the end of Agénor de Mauléon for the Espagnol; and lastly, one from Emile de

Girardin, demanding the Memoirs of a Physician for the Presse. In such a crisis he would call together his literary creditors and obtain ten days grace of Véron, three months of Lefloch, a week of Bertin, three days of Considerant, twenty-four hours of Zabban, and a month of de Girardin. These granted, he would fulfil his obligations like a gentleman,

to the hour.

The same writer adds one of Dumas's mots. He had invented a word in jest, and was taken to task for it.

"If you wish to coin words you should first try for the Académie," suggested a friend. "I'll take care I don't!"

"Afraid of being rejected?" "No; of being accepted!"

DUMAS'S ENERGY

Viellot, the author's secretary, in one of these "confidences," declared that although for five years he scarcely ever left his master, he rarely or never saw Dumas asleep. If he was not writing, he was reading, no matter at what hour of night or morning his assistant came upon him. Autran, the poet, who was once Dumas's guest, here adds his testimony. "If by chance I woke in the night," he writes, "my half-sleep would be soothed by a light, monotonous, continuous sound that stopped at intervals and began again more persistently. The first time I heard it my curiosity was excited. I discov

ered that it was the pen of the great romancer, who occupied the next room. Awakened every night at about two o'clock by some internal pain, he was not the man to waste time, and so utilised his moments of suffering by rising and resuming his work. Day come, I would see him from my window, marching up and down the garden, head bare, chest half uncovered. February's snows fell in thick flakes and the wind howled, but little he cared, as he strode on, his brain busy with his plots-now and then halting to visit one of the two little pavilions at the bottom of the garden, the one containing his library, the other the collection of apes-which he called his 'Académie Française'!"

Autran goes on to relate a significant anecdote connected with the public funeral of Mademoiselle Mars, the great tragedienne. Dumas and Hugo were two of the pall-bearers, and as the cortège passed through the huge crowd, there were constant cries of "Yon's Dumas!" "See, that's Dumas!" "Look at Dumas!" and never a voice cried "That's Victor Hugo!" At the top of the Rue Lafitte Hugo had disappeared!

As we have seen, Dumas never lost an opportunity of loosing a shaft of wit against the Académie Française, and he might have let Piron's epitaph serve as his own, as that of one

Qui ne fut rien.
Pas même Académicien!

NE indisputable service has Ibsen rendered to the drama-he has revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of a poetphilosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the final decades of the nineteenth century-when the novel was despotic in its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary expression, and when arrogant writers of fiction, like Edmond de Goncourt, did not hesitate to declare that the drama was outworn at last, that it was unfitted to convey the ideas interesting to the modern world and that it had fallen to be no more than a toy to amuse the idle after dinner-Ibsen brought forth a succession of social dramas as though to prove that the playhouse of our own time could supply a platform whereon a man might free his

soul and boldly deliver his message, if only he had first mastered the special conditions of the playwright's art. Of course, Ibsen has solved none of the problems he has propounded; nor was it his business as a dramatist to provide solutions of the strange enigmas of life, but rather to force us to exert ourselves to find each of us the best answer we could.

No one who has followed the history of the theatre for the past quarter of a century can fail to acknowledge that these social plays of Ibsen have exerted a direct, an immediate and a powerful influence on the development of the contemporary drama. It is easy to dislike them; indeed, it is not hard even to detest them; but it is impossible to deny that they have been a stimulus to the dramatists of every modern languageand not least to playwrights of various nationalities wholly out of sympathy with Ibsen's own philosophy. The fascination of these social dramas may be charmless, as Mr. Henry James once asserted; but there is no gainsaying the fascination itself. As M. Maeterlinck has declared,