The keynote to a comprehension of all these vehement romances and prefaces and plays is the moral temperament of the author. He was a very close observer of life, and he was born into the world with disadvantages which would have made him a very sour observer, if he had not also been extremely lucky, and if he had not been almost immediately relieved from anxiety by ex ceptional good fortune. But he was not so re lieved too soon to have noticed, with his native clairvoyance, that less lucky people are exposed to a system of social disability which can prove so irksome to them as to destroy the pleasure of life altogether. So, on behalf of these exceptionally luckless persons, the exceptionally lucky Dumas early decided to be a propagandist. He was born to look upon literature as the natural weapon of a modern man, but he scorned to use the pen for personal objects only. His great father, [e pm prodzgue, had been all for self; Alexandre the second, in his odd way, would be all for others. He became, as we put it, conscious of a mission.