for him, and he has added his impression that it is only those who, intellectually, never outgrow their boyhood who continue to delight in such "sensational chronicles of impossible deeds."
It is in this latter statement, which has been repeated over and over again with as many variations as a popular air, that the peculiar temper of the realist stands revealed. He is not only sure that stories of adventure are not to his liking, but he is equally sure that those who do enjoy them are his intellectual inferiors, or at least that they have not reached a mental maturity commensurate with his own. He says so, with pleasing candor, whenever he has the opportunity. He is, in general, what the Ettrick Shepherd neatly terms "a bigot to his ain abeelities," and it would be hard to convince him that Dumas is none the less, in the words of Michelet, "a force of nature," because he is not personally stirred by that force, or because he knows a number of intelligent men who are no more affected than he is. For myself, I can but say that, being constrained once to spend two days in Marseilles, the only thing that reconciled me to my fate
