for me, I must confess, they
definitely get in the way of the interest. For essays, "good": for
novels, "no."

[147] Vide _Guy Mannering_ as to the "macers."

[148] _Les Chouans._

[149] Forty vols. London: 1895-8.

[150] _Quarterly Review_ for January 1907.

[151] I believe I may say, without fatuity, that the general
Introduction and the _Quarterly_ article, above referred to, contain
most things that anybody but a special student will need.

[152] It is, however, important to remember that almost the whole of the
first of these three decades was taken up with the tentatives, while the
concluding _lustrum_ was comparatively infertile. The _Comedie_ was, in
the main, the crop of fifteen years only.

[153] It ought always to be, but has not always been, put as a round sum
to his credit in this part of the account that he heartily recognised
the value of Scott as a novelist. A hasty thinker might be surprised at
this; not so the wiser mind.

[154] This remarkable person deserves at least a note here "for one
thing that he did"--the novel of _Fragoletta_ (1829), which many should
know _of_--though they may not know _it_--from Mr. Swinburne's poem, and
some perhaps from Balzac's own review. It is one of the followings of
_La Religieuse_, and is a disappointing book, not from being too immoral
nor from being not immoral enough, but because it does not "come off."
There is a certain promise, suggestion, "atmosphere," but the actual
characterisation is vague and obscure, and the story is told with no
grasp. This habit of "flashing in the pan" is said to have been
characteristic of all Latouche's work, which was fairly voluminous and
of many different kinds, from journalism to poetry; and it may have been
partly due to, partly the cause of, a cross-grained disposition. He had,
however, a high repute for spoken if not written criticism, had a great
influence as a trainer or mentor on George Sand, and perhaps not a
little on Balzac himself. During the later years of his fairly long life
he lived in retirement and produced nothing.

[155] One of the friends who have read my proofs takes a more
Alexandrian way with this objection and says "But there _are_." I do not
know that I disagree with him: but as he does not disagree with what
follows in itself, both answers shall stand.

[156] Cf. Maupassant's just protest against this, to which we shall
come.

[157] An actual reduction of Balzac's books to smaller but still