men were concerned as well as women, his
personal means of attraction, when he chose to
exert them, strengthened immensely his literary
claims on the sympathy and good-will of others.
He appears to have possessed in the highest
degree those powers of fascination which are
quite independent of mere beauty of face and
form, and which are perversely and inexplicably
bestowed in the most lavish abundance on the
most unprincipled of mankind. Poor Monsieur
Werdet can only account for half his own acts of
indiscretion by declaring that his eminent friend
wheedled him into committing them. Other
and wiser men kept out of Balzac's way,
through sheer distrust of themselves. Virtuous
friends, who tried hard to reform him, retreated
from his presence, declaring that the reprobate
whom they had gone to convert had all but
upset their moral balance in a morning's conversation.
An eminent literary gentleman, who
went to spend the day with him to talk over a
proposed work, rushed out of the house after a
two hours' interview, exclaiming piteously,
"The man's imagination is in a state of
delirium—his talk has set my brain in a whirl—he
would have driven me mad if I had spent the
day with him!" If men were influenced in this
way, it is not wonderful that women (whose
self-esteem was delicately flattered by the
prominent and fascinating position which they hold
in all his books) should have worshipped a man
who publicly and privately worshipped them.

His personal appearance would have recalled
to English minds the popular idea of Friar
Tuck—he was the very model of the conventional
fat, sturdy, red-faced, jolly monk. But
he had the eye of a man of genius, and the
tongue of a certain infernal personage, who may
be broadly hinted at, but who must on no
account be plainly named. The Balzac candle-
stick might be clumsy enough; but when once
the Balzac candle was lit, the moths flew into it,
only too readily, from all points of the compass.

The last important act of his life was, in a
worldly point of view, one of the wisest things
he ever did. The lady who had invited him to
Vienna, and whom he called Carissima, was the
wife of a wealthy Russian nobleman. On the
death of her husband, she practically asserted
her admiration of her favourite author by offering
him her hand and fortune. Balzac accepted both;
and returned to Paris (from which respect for
his creditors had latterly kept him absent) a
married man, and an enviable member of the wealthy
class of society. A splendid future now opened
before him—but it opened too late. Arrived at
the end of his old course, he just saw the new
career beyond him, and dropped on the threshold
of it. The strong constitution which he had
remorselessly wasted for more than twenty years
past, gave way at length, at the very time when
his social chances looked most brightly. Three
months after his marriage, Honoré de Balzac
died, after unspeakable suffering, of disease of
the heart. He was then but fifty years of age.
His fond, proud, heart-broken old mother held
him in her arms. On that loving bosom he had
drawn his first breath—on that loving bosom the
weary head sank to rest again, when the wild,
wayward, miserable, glorious life was over.

The sensation produced in Paris by his death
was something akin to the sensation produced
in London by the death of Byron. Mr. Carlyle
has admirably said that there is something
touching in the loyalty of men to their Sovereign-
Man! That loyalty most tenderly declared
itself when Balzac was no more. Men of all
ranks and parties, who had been shocked by his
want of principle and disgusted by his inordinate
vanity while he was alive, now accepted universally
the atonement of his untimely death, and
remembered nothing but the loss that had
happened to the literature of France. A great
writer was no more; and a great people rose
with one accord to take him reverently and
gloriously to his grave. The French Institute,
the University, the scientific societies, the
Association of Dramatic Authors, the Schools of Law
and Medicine, sent their representatives to walk
in the funeral procession. English readers,
American readers, German readers, and Russian
readers, swelled the immense assembly of French-
men that followed the coffin. Victor Hugo and
Alexandre Dumas were among the mourners
who supported the pall. The first of these two
celebrated men pronounced the funeral oration
over Balzac's grave, and eloquently
characterised the whole series of the dead writer's
works as forming, in truth, but one grand book,
the text-book of contemporary civilisation. With
that just and generous tribute to the genius of
Balzac, offered by the most illustrious of his
literary rivals, these few pages may fitly and
gracefully come to an end. Of the miserable
frailties of the man, enough has been recorded to
serve the first of all interests, the interest of
truth. The better and nobler part of him calls
for no further comment at any writer's hands.
It remains to us in his works, and it speaks
with deathless eloquence for itself.

A CAR-FULL OF FAIRIES.

I WAS, knapsack on my back, with occasional
lifts on jaunting-cars, making a tour of Ireland,
hearing shillelaghs rattle, seeing whisky drunk,
and listening to rebellious songs all about pikes
and the Shan van vocht, or the old prophetess
who, in '98, predicted the arrival of the French.

I was a tourist on my way through Connemara,
determined to hear as much of the brogue,
see as much of the big blue mountains called
"the Twelve Pins," and pick up as many stories
of banshees and Ribbonmen as I could in a few
weeks. I had come from Killarney, where the
spectre king, O'Donohue, mailed in sunshine,
rides over the lake every May morning, and I
was going to Donegal, the country of rock dwarfs,
smugglers, and mine spirits. I knew if there
was a fairy to be found, in Ireland I should
hear of it from Dennis O'Flanagan, who was to
drive me in the jaunting-car between Ballyrobin
and Ballynabrig, and so it proved.