well have built a battery at Gibraltar to destroy Sevastopol. The guns won't reach. Our cause is something higher, something holier than the founding of states. Any five hundred men with thews and sinews, and a moderate share of prudence, can found a state; it is nothing new or wonderful to do. And after we had founded such a state, our work in the United States would remain to be done by other hands. Our work here, is, to purify the State, and purify Christianity from the foul blot which here rests upon them.
All articles in the Magazine, not otherwise designated, will be the products of the pens of colored men and women, from whom we earnestly solicit contributions, which, when used, will be paid for, according to the means of the Publisher.
We hope from these sources, articles grave and gay, things serious, and as the Rev. Mr. Hudson quaintly says, 'things juicy.' 'The Tales of the Fugitives,' to be initiated in our next number, will leave the heart and the imagination not untouched. This one is 'got up' in rather a hurry, and we beg pardon for its many deficiencies.
Whatever claims the American School of Ethnology may lay to Sappho, Euclid, St. Cyprian, or Terentius, they must yield to the negro an undoubted share in Pushkin, the Negro-Russian poet, in Placido the Negro-Spanish poet, and in Dumas the Negro-Celtic Historian, Dramatist and Romancer.
The grand parents of M. Dumas were the Marquis de la Pailleterie, a wealthy planter of St. Domingo, and a negress of that island; his father was a famous cavalry officer under Napoleon. The death of his father leaving him destitute, young Dumas repaired to Paris, with letters to General Foi (an old companion in arms of Gen. Dumas,) seeking employment: after questioning him of his attainments, Gen. Foi was about to give up in despair, when he accidentally discovered that young Dumas wrote a neat and rapid hand: he procured him a clerkship in the office of the Secretary of the Duke of Orleans (afterward Louis Philippe.) The leisure of Dumas was occupied in satiating that prodigious thirst for knowledge which has distinguished the youth of energetic men preparing to make their mark. A representation of Hamlet first touched his latent genius for dramatic composition, and Dumas' earliest play, Henry III, et sa Cour, was the result: it was a great success; and the brain and pen of Dumas have been steadily, marvellously at work ever since. And not only his own pen and brain, but the pen and brains of dozens of scribes, and as many authors in the employ or under the auspices of this great book-wright.
A captious and pitiful criticism, on the part of British and American writers, has objected to Dumas, that, very many of his plays and nouvellettes are the products of the brains of others simply altered and retouched by his own hand. A generous objection, truly, on the part of those who worship Shakespeare, and sing praises to the hosts of those, down to Scott, Moore and Byron, who bear the same relation to Shakespeare, that the old painter represented subsequent poets to bear to Homer. Take from Shakespeare, all his borrowed stories, and what of invention have we left?
We beg pardon—we do not mean to compare Dumas with Shakspeare—there is time enough, these two hundred years, for a negro dramatist to rise in rivalry with the bard of Avon; perhaps Scott might be memtioned in comparison with Dumas; as novelists, as limners of the manners, language and customs of the middle ages, there is a strong parallelism between them; in descriptive writing, Scott, who revelled in the outdoor life of the
