The Half Brothers

By universal consent ALEXANDRE DUMAS, pere is now acknowledged the most entertaining of the writers of romance. For variety of incidents, sprightliness of dialogue, and vividness of narrative no tales of adventure can compete with such works as The Three Musketeers or the Count of Monte Cristo. It is doubtful also, whether the life of any novelist comes as near as the life of Alexandre Dumas to what is expected of an entertaining work of fiction. Viewed as a hero of romance, the great novelist is almost as striking a figure as his picturesque and fascinating D'Artagnan, so that his Memoirs and the numerous volumes in which he relates the story of his travels seem to differ from his other narrative works only in the use, for the hero, of the first instead of the third person of the verb.But whether Dumas takes us through the halls and corridors of the Louvre, at the time of Catherine of Medici, Charles IX., or Henry III., to some treasure cave under the waters of the Mediterranean, to the Palais Royal, with Richelieu, or to the walls of Janina, with the terrible Ali-Pasha, he always holds us, wistfully listening to his wonderful story-telling, even with the look of the child carried away to fairy-land by the old tales of the nursery.