itical diatribes, "physiologies" and the like--which, with his
discarded prefaces and much more interesting matter, were at last,
not many years ago, included in four stout volumes of the _Edition
Definitive_. With the exception of the _Physiologies_ (a sort of short
satiric analysis of this or that class, character, or personage), which
were very popular in the reign of Louis Philippe in France, and which
Albert Smith and others introduced into England, Balzac did not do any
of this miscellaneous work extremely well. Very shrewd observations are
to be found in his reviews, for instance his indication, in reviewing La
Touche's _Fragoletta_, of that common fault of ambitious novels, a sort
of woolly and "ungraspable" looseness of construction and story, which
constantly bewilders the reader as to what is going on. But, as a rule,
he was thinking too much of his own work and his own principles of
working to enter very thoroughly into the work of others. His politics,
those of a moderate but decided Royalist and Conservative, were, as has
been said, intelligent in theory, but in practice a little distinguished
by that neglect of actual business detail which has been noticed in his
speculations.

At last, in the summer of 1847, it seemed as if the Rachel for whom
he had served nearly if not quite the full fourteen years already, and
whose husband had long been out of the way, would at last grant herself
to him. He was invited to Vierzschovnia in the Ukraine, the seat
of Madame Hanska, or in strictness of her son-in-law, Count Georges
Mniszech; and as the visit was apparently for no restricted period, and
Balzac's pretensions to the lady's hand were notorious, it might have
seemed that he was as good as accepted. But to assume this would have
been to mistake what perhaps the greatest creation of Balzac's great
English contemporary and counterpart on the one side, as Thackeray was
his contemporary and counterpart on the other, considered to be the
malignity of widows. What the reasons were which made Madame Hanska
delay so long in doing what she did at last, and might just as well, it
would seem, have done years before, is not certainly known, and it would
be quite unprofitable to discuss them. But it was on the 8th of October
1847 that Balzac first wrote to his sister from Vierzschovnia, and it
was not till the 14th of March 1850 that, "in the parish church of
Saint Barbara at Berditchef, by the Count Abbe Czarski, representi