King's Gallant — Alexandre Dumas

When Henri III et sa Cour first appeared, it was sneered at, then denounced; but the great French dramatist believed in his work, and, after a season of storm and stress, it put to flight the purblind critics, crushing their fossil pleas for continuance of the long-winded and very mechanical speeches and labored action that were part and parcel of plays of the period.

If this work is full with the rushing sap of springÂ's apple-trees, it is because Dumas was but a youth when he wrote it; but a youth who, later on, made the delighted French proclaim him their "Wizard of Fiction."