build a structure boldly from the bare earth.  This necessity of finding a certain straw for their bricks, which must be picked up by the roadside, not only impedes the work of authorship, but must add greatly to their personal discomfort throughout the whole of their travels.  They are in perpetual chase of something for the book.  They bag an incident with as much glee as a sportsman his first bird in September.  They are out on pleasure, but manifestly they have their task too; it is not quite holiday, only half-holiday with them.  The prospect or the picture gives no pleasure till it has suggested the appropriate expression of enthusiasm, which, once safely deposited in the note-book, the enthusiasm itself can be quietly indulged in, or permitted to evaporate.  At the dinner-table, even when champagne is circulating, if a jest or a story falls flat, they see with an Aristotelian precision the cause of its failure, and how an additional touch, or a more auspicious moment, would have procured for it a better fate; they stop to pick it up, they clean it, they revolve the chapter and the page to which it shall lend its lustre.  Nay, it is noticeable, that without much labour from the polisher, many a dull thing in conversation has made a good thing in print; the conditions of success are so different.  Now, from all such toils and perplexities M. Dumas is evidently free; free as the wildest Oxonian who flies abroad in the mere wanton prodigality of spirits and of purse.  His book is made, or can be made, when he chooses:  fortune favours the bold, and incidents will always dispose themselves dramatically to the dramatist.

Our traveller opens his campaign at Nice.  It may be observed that M. Dumas cannot be accused, like the present minister of his country, of any partiality to the English; if the mortifying truth must be told, he has no love of us at all; to which humour, so long as he delivers himself of it with any wit or pleasantry, he is heartily welcome.  Our first extract will be thought, perhaps, to taste of this humour; but we quote it for the absurd proof it affords of the manner in which we English have overflooded some portions of the Continent:—­

“As to the inhabitants of Nice, every traveller is to them an Englishman.  Every foreigner they see, without distinction of complexion, hair, beard, dress, age, or sex, has, in their imagination, arrived from a certain mysterious city lost in the midst of fogs, where the inhabitants have heard of the sun only from tradition, where the orange and the pine-apple are unknown except by name, where there is no ripe fruit but baked apples, and which is called London.

    “Whilst I was at the York Hotel, a carriage drawn by post
    horses drove up; and, soon after, the master of the hotel
    entering into my room, I asked him who were his new arrivals.

    “‘Sono certi Inglesi,’ he answered, ’ma non saprei dire se
    sono Francesi o Tedeschi.  Some English, but I cannot say
    whether French or German.’”—­Vol. i. p. 9.