A generation suffering from mental and physical anæmia—a generation devoted to the “chiselled phrase,” to accumulated “documents,” to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human—may readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations. Like one of the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To you, who can amuse the world—to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the battlefield, and the sea—the world must always return: escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the _bouges_, from the surgeries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the wearisome De Goncourt. With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense. The passions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of adventures! Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois (“La Reine Margot,” “La Dame de Montsoreau,” “Les Quarante-cinq”), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze (“Les Trois Mousquetaires,” “Vingt Ans Après,” “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne”); and, beside these two trilogies—a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three pyramids—“Monte Cristo.”