For a Life of Napoleon he got $90,000, and for the novel of Woodstock he got $40,000. He exhausted himself in the effort, and died seven years later, owing only £30,000, which a publisher advanced on all his copyrights. He did not begin to write novels until he was forty-two, and then he turned them out with incredible speed. Waverley was written in three weeks, and another was written in “six weeks at Christmas.” He wrote thirty-two novels in sixteen years, besides doing various other work such as his Life of Napoleon. Taine summarizes his style as a novelist thus: “In history as in architecture he was bent on arranging points of view and Gothic halls. He had neither talent nor leisure to reach the depths of his characters.” And again, “After all, his characters, to whatever age he transfers them, are his neighbours, cannie farmers, vain lords, gloved gentlemen, young marriageable ladies, all more or less commonplace.” But the romantic novel was carried to its greatest heights of interest and excitement by Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo--especially Dumas. These two young Frenchmen had heard of Scott’s fame, and had read his novels, and they made up their minds that this was the popular line to follow. So each brought out a romantic play in Paris, which was successful. Thus the romantic movement was started in France; and it was not long before the novels began to appear, and were so popular that Dumas set up a sort of novel factory, where he had many people working for him writing novels for which he had orders. In all he turned out over twelve hundred. Next to Scott, Dumas is the great original historic novelist. His books are not such good history as Scott’s, but they are much more interesting. Yet there are comparatively few of the twelve hundred bearing the name of Dumas that one cares to read to-day. Of these the most characteristic is The Three Musketeers and its two sequels, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. The three novels cover the period in France from 1625 to 1665, and every page is alive with duels, escapes, intrigues, and all sorts of French adventures. A country lad from Gascony named D’Artagnan comes up to Paris in search of adventure. He is riding a raw-boned yellow pony, and has three crowns in his pocket. The first day he gets into three duels, and in each case makes a friend of his antagonist. These three friends, called Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, follow him through all his adventures. All become great and powerful men in France. This is the point in which the great novelists differ from the less. They give us great men, while the little ones give us only common men. Dumas’s success with The Three Musketeers has led to many modern books of the same sort, the best of which are probably Stanley Weyman’s House of the Wolf, Under the Red Robe, and Gentleman of France, and Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda.