w I'm getting to be an old fellow, and
here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads, if I thought
anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o'
sorrowful.' That is the discordant chorus of the gravediggers in
'Hamlet.' At length the body is found, and poor Zenobia is brought to
the shore with her knees still bent in the attitude of prayer, and her
hands clenched in immitigable defiance. Foster tries in vain to
straighten the dead limbs. As the teller of the story gazes at her, the
grimly ludicrous reflection occurs to him that if Zenobia had foreseen
all 'the ugly circumstances of death--how ill it would become her, the
altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially old
Silas Foster's efforts to improve the matter--she would no more have
committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public
assembly in a badly-fitting garment.'

_BALZAC'S NOVELS_

Balzac exacts more attention than most novel-readers are inclined to
give; he is often repulsive, and not unfrequently dull; but the student
who has once submitted to his charm becomes spell-bound. Disgusted for a
moment, he returns again and again to the strange, hideous, grotesque,
but most interesting world to which Balzac alone can introduce him. Like
the opium-eater, he acquires a taste for the visions that are conjured
up before him with so vivid a colouring, that he almost believes in
their objective existence. There are perhaps greater novelists than
Balzac; there are many who preach a purer morality; and many who give a
far greater impression of general intellectual force; but in this one
quality of intense realisation of actors and scenery he is unique.

Balzac, indeed, was apparently himself almost incapable of
distinguishing his dreams from realities. Great wits, we know, are
allied to madness; and the boundaries seem in his case to have been most
shadowy and indistinct. Indeed, if the anecdotes reported of him be
accurate--some of them are doubtless rather overcharged--he must have
lived almost in a state of permanent hallucination. This, for example,
is a characteristic story. He inhabited for some years a house called
_les Jardies_, in the neighbourhood of Paris. He had a difficulty in
providing material furniture, owing to certain debts, which, as some
sceptics insinuated, were themselves a vast mystification. He habitually
ascribed his poverty to a certain 'deficit Kessner,' a loss which
r