Hanska, on her marriage, made over her large
fortune to her daughter.

Balzac had at last found rest and happiness, but his enjoyment of these
blessings was brief. The energy that he had expended to gain them left
nothing behind it. His terrible industry had blasted the soil it passed
over; he had sacrificed to his work the very things he worked for. One
cannot do what Balzac did and live. He was enfeebled, exhausted, broken.
He died in Paris three months after his marriage. The reader feels that
premature death is the logical, the harmonious completion of such a
career. The strongest man has but a certain fixed quantity of life to
expend, and we may expect that if he works habitually fifteen hours a
day, he will spend it while, arithmetically speaking, he is yet young.

We have been struck in reading these letters with the strong analogy
between Balzac's career and that of the great English writer whose
history was some time since so expansively written by Mr. Forster.
Dickens and Balzac take much in common; as individuals they strongly
resemble each other; their differences are chiefly differences of race.
Each was a man of affairs, an active, practical man, with a temperament
of almost phenomenal vigor and a prodigious quantity of life to expend.
Each had a character and a will--what is nowadays called a
personality--which imposed themselves irresistibly; each had a
boundless self-confidence and a magnificent egotism. Each had always a
hundred irons on the fire; each was resolutely determined to make money,
and made it in large quantities. In intensity of imaginative power, the
power of evoking visible objects and figures, seeing them themselves
with the force of hallucination, and making others see them all but just
as vividly, they were almost equal. Here there is little to choose
between them; they have had no rivals but each other and Shakespeare.
But they most of all resemble each other in the fact that they treated
their extraordinary imaginative force as a matter of business; that they
worked it as a gold mine, violently and brutally; overworked and ravaged
it. They succumbed to the task that they had laid upon themselves, and
they are as similar in their deaths as in their lives. Of course, if
Dickens is an English Balzac, he is a very English Balzac. His fortune
was the easier of the two, and his prizes were greater than the other's.
His brilliant opulent English prosperity, centred in a home and diffused