has claimed his pious offices; he puts on his black robe and a broad hat, takes the taper in his hand, and goes forth where the voice of misery has called him.  If it is some wounded man, they bear him to the hospital; if the man is dead, to a chapel:  the nobleman and the day labourer, clothed with the same robe, support together the same litter, and the link which unites these two extremes of society is some sick pauper, who, knowing neither, is praying equally for both.  And when these brothers of mercy have quitted the house, the children whose father they have carried out, or the wife whose husband they have borne away, have but to look around them, and always, on some worm-eaten piece of furniture, there will be found a pious alms, deposited by an unknown hand.

“The Grand-duke himself is a member of this fraternity, and I have been assured that more than once, at the sound of that melancholy bell, he has clothed himself in the uniform of charity, and penetrated unknown, side by side with a day-labourer, to the bed’s head of some dying wretch, and that his presence had afterwards been detected only by the alms he had left behind.”—­p. 126.

It is not to be supposed that our dramatist pursues the same direct and unadventurous route that lies open to every citizen of Paris and London.  At the end of the first volume we leave him still at Florence; we open the second, and we find him and his companion Jadin, and his companion’s dog Milord, standing at the port of Naples, looking out for some vessel to take them to Sicily.  So that we have travels in Italy with Rome left out.  Not that he did not visit Rome, but that we have no “souvenirs” of his visit here.  As the book is a mere capriccio, there can be no possible objection taken to it on this score.  Besides, the island of Sicily, which becomes the chief scene of his adventures, is less beaten ground.  Nor do we hear much of Naples, for he quits Naples almost as soon as he had entered it.  This last fact requires explanation.

M. Dumas has had the honour to be an object of terror or of animosity to crowned heads.  When at Genoa, his Sardinian Majesty manifested this hostility to M. Dumas—­we presume on account of his too liberal politics—­by dispatching an emissary of the police to notify to him that he must immediately depart from Genoa.  Which emissary of his Sardinian Majesty had no sooner delivered his royal sentence of deportation, than he extended his hand for a pour boire.  Either M. Dumas must be a far more formidable person than we have any notion of, or majesty can be very nervous, or very spiteful.  And now, when he is about to enter Naples——­but why do we presume to relate M. Dumas’s personal adventures in any other language than his own? or language as near his own as we—­who are, we must confess, imperfect translators—­can hope to give.