ost earnestly dissuade me. I gather, though I am not
sure, that Mr. Wedmore, the latest writer in English on Balzac at any
length, had not read them through when he wrote.

Now I have, and a most curious study they are. Indeed I am not sorry,
as Mr. Wedmore thinks one would be. They are curiously, interestingly,
almost enthrallingly bad. Couched for the most part in a kind of
Radcliffian or Monk-Lewisian vein--perhaps studied more directly from
Maturin (of whom Balzac was a great admirer) than from either--they
often begin with and sometimes contain at intervals passages not unlike
the Balzac that we know. The attractive title of _Jane la Pale_ (it
was originally called, with a still more Early Romantic avidity for
_baroque_ titles, _Wann-Chlore_) has caused it, I believe, to be
more commonly read than any other. It deals with a disguised duke, a
villainous Italian, bigamy, a surprising offer of the angelic first wife
to submit to a sort of double arrangement, the death of the second wife
and first love, and a great many other things. _Argow le Pirate_ opens
quite decently and in order with that story of the _employe_ which
Balzac was to rehandle so often, but drops suddenly into brigands
stopping diligences, the marriage of the heroine Annette with a retired
pirate marquis of vast wealth, the trial of the latter for murdering
another marquis with a poisoned fish-bone scarf-pin, his execution,
the sanguinary reprisals by his redoubtable lieutenant, and a finale
of blunderbusses, fire, devoted peasant girl with _retrousse_ nose, and
almost every possible _tremblement_.

In strictness mention of this should have been preceded by mention of
_Le Vicaire des Ardennes_, which is a sort of first part of _Argow le
Pirate_, and not only gives an account of his crimes, early history,
and manners (which seem to have been a little robustious for such a
mild-mannered man as Annette's husband), but tells a thrilling tale of
the loves of the _vicaire_ himself and a young woman, which loves are
crossed, first by the belief that they are brother and sister, and
secondly by the _vicaire_ having taken orders under this delusion. _La
Derniere Fee_ is the queerest possible cross between an actual fairy
story _a la_ Nordier and a history of the fantastic and inconstant loves
of a great English lady, the Duchess of "Sommerset" (a piece of
actual _scandalum magnatum_ nearly as bad as Balzac's cool use in his
acknowledged work of the title "Lo