e
would consent to sell a packet of letters which the Vicomte coveted
specially. Sometimes incidentally there were delightful surprises, and
occasionally real joys; as on the occasion when the searcher found at
a distant grocer's shop, the middle of the letter, of which the first
page had been saved from destruction at the hands of the cobbler.

The bitter dislike Balzac had evoked in the literary world, and his
occasional obscurity and clumsy style, have militated very strongly
against his popularity in his native land, where perfection in the
manipulation of words is of supreme importance in a writer. While in
France, however, Balzac's undoubted faults have partially blinded his
countrymen to his consummate merits as a writer, and they have been
strangely slow in acknowledging the debt of gratitude they owe to him,
the rest or the world has already begun to realise his power of
creating type, his wonderful imagination, his versatility, and his
extraordinary impartiality; and to accord him his rightful place among
the Immortals. Nevertheless we are still too near to him, to be able
to focus him clearly, and to estimate aright his peculiar place in
literature, or the full scope of his genius.

Some very great authorities claim him as a member of the Romantic
School; while, on the other hand, he is often looked on--apparently
with more reason--as the first of the Realists. His object in writing
was, he tells us, to represent mankind as he saw it, to be the
historian of the nineteenth century, and to classify human beings as
Buffon had classified animals. No doubt this scheme was very
imperfectly carried out: certainly the powerful mind of Balzac with
its wealth of imagination, often projected itself into his puppets, so
that many of his characters are not the ordinary men and women he
wished to portray, but are inspired by the fire of genius. This fact
does not, however, alter the aim of their creator. He intended to be
merely a chronicler, a scientific observer of things around him; and
though his works are tinged to a large extent with the Romanticism of
the powerful school in vogue in his day, this object marks him plainly
as the forerunner of the Realists, the founder of a totally new
conception of the scope and range of the novel.

Theophile Gautier's words should prove to the modern reader, the debt
of gratitude he owes to the inaugurator of a completely original
system of fiction. Speaking of Balzac's impecunio