D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Wh Sd dd lb’ Gad wi Dumas and ‘‘D’Artagnan!”’ The Inseparables! This banner-knight carried ‘‘the Extraordinary Au- thor’s’” fame all over the reading world, and won homage through his favorite—everybody’s—and the most char- acteristic hero in noveldom. It was by the Gascon Free-captain, inextinguishable and ever-living in his native wit, that Dumas’ talent was displayed at the first flight. Bold, sustained and vigor- ous, all could trace to what heretofore inaccessible height and on what delectable ground it would lead us. As there is no historian more popular and more credited, and no novelist more historic, so his type and model of the Noble Adventurer, brave as his sword, steady as his aim, faithful to virtue as to his King, remains the chief admired and endeared to students as to his own chron- icler. In Louis D’Artagnan, ‘‘the Illustrious Dumas” (to use the King of England’s epithet) did what was accounted impossible: created a character. It was thought that times, pressure of men, compact with society, pinches of crises, these formed a man. But our originator was always modest—strange this in him termed plagiarist, monopolist, vainglorious! But let Dumas protest in his own words: ‘1 am a humanizing and vulgarizing story-teller. Natur- Gomichbooksreom