It would be a shame to employ the same metaphor in writing of the Romantic author who, following in Vitet's steps, set himself to dramatise historical episodes, and who in February 1829, a year before Victor Hugo, achieved popularity with a historical drama, _Henri III. et sa Cour_. This writer was Alexandre Dumas (born in 1803), a man of brilliant, spontaneous talent and Titanic constitution, who displayed the same aptitude for Herculean tasks in literature as his father had done in war. For forty years he continued without a pause to produce tragedies, comedies, novels, short stories, books of travel, and memoirs. It would be foolish to write contemptuously of such prodigious inventiveness, such incredible productivity. We can trace in these works the French-African blood; there is something in them of the easy-going Creole disposition, something of the ardent sensuality of the negro race. Assisted by numerous collaborators, all much inferior to himself, Dumas peopled the stages, crowded the booksellers' shelves, filled the _feuilleton_ columns of the newspapers with the creations of his brain; the printing-presses creaked and groaned in their efforts to keep pace with his incessant production. What one cannot but regret is the easy-going worldliness which prevented any real process of development taking place. Dumas was an artist only in his first period. Beginning in a romantic age, he began romantically; continuing in a commercial age, he continued commercially. In _Henri III et sa Cour_ he did what Vitet had not succeeded in doing with the same historical material, namely, produced a spirited and playable drama; but it was a drama in which the defiance of classic theatrical convention was of the most superficial kind. He ventured to reproduce in externals the court customs of the period. On the boards where for a couple of centuries the hero and his confidant had conversed either with both arms hanging by their sides or with their left hands on their sword-hilts, a whole troop of King Henry's courtiers appeared with cups and balls (the game of cup-and-ball was an invention of that day); and in the pauses these same gentlemen amused themselves by blowing small darts out of blow-pipes. Nevertheless they felt and spoke like the young men of 1828.