At the age of fifteen Dumas, like Scott, became a notary's clerk. About this time he saw 'Hamlet' played, in the version of Ducis. Corneille and Racine had always been disliked by this born romanticist. 'Hamlet' carried him off his feet. Soon afterwards he read Bürger's 'Lenore,' the ballad which Scott translated at the very beginning of his career as an author. "Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode, Splash! splash! along the sea; The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, The flashing pebbles flee." This German ballad, says Scott, "struck him as the kind of thing he could do himself." And Dumas found that the refrain "Hurrah, fantôme, les morts vont vite," was more to his taste than the French poetry of the eighteenth century. He tried to translate 'Lenore.' Scott finished it in a night; Dumas gave up in despair. But this, he says, was the beginning of his authorship. He had not yet opened a volume of Scott or Cooper, "ces deux grands romanciers." With a friend named Leuven he began to try to write plays (1820-1821). He now poached his way to Paris, defraying his expenses with the game he shot on the road. Shakespeare too was a poacher; let us excuse the eccentricities of genius. He made Talma's acquaintance; he went to the play; he resigned his clerkship: "Paris was my future." Thither he went; his father's name served him with General Foy, and he obtained a little post in the household of the Duc D'Orléans--a supernumerary secretaryship at £60 a year. At the play he met Charles Nodier, reading the rarest of Elzevirs, and at intervals (like Charles Lamb) hissing his own piece! This delightful scene, with its consequences, occupies one hundred and thirty pages! Dumas now made the acquaintance of Frederic Soulié, and became a pillar of theatres. He began to read with a purpose: first he read Scott; "The clouds lifted, and I beheld new horizons." Then he turned to Cooper; then to Byron. One day he entered his office, crying aloud, "Byron is dead!" "Who is Byron?" said one of his chiefs. Here Dumas breaks off in his 'Memoirs' to give a life of Byron! He fought his first duel in the snow, and won an easy, almost a bloodless victory. For years he and Leuven wrote plays together,--plays which were never accepted.