As to _Argow le Pirate_[159] and _Jane la Pale_ (I have never ceased lamenting that he did not keep the earlier title, _Wann-Chlore_) and the rest, they have interest of various kinds. Some of it has been glanced at already--you cannot fully appreciate Balzac without them. But there is another kind of interest, perhaps not of very general appeal, but not to be neglected by the historian. They are almost the only accessible body, except Pigault-Lebrun's latest and Paul de Kock's earliest, of the popular fiction _before_ 1830, of the stuff of which, as previously mentioned, Ducray-Duminil, the lesser Ducange, and many others are representatives, but representatives difficult to get at. This class of fiction, which arose in all parts of Europe during the last years of the eighteenth century and the earlier of the nineteenth, has very similar characteristics, though the examples differ very slightly in different countries. What are known with us as the Terror Novel, the Minerva Press, the Silver Fork school, etc. etc., all have their part in it, and even higher influences, such as Scott's, are not wanting. _Han d'Islande_ and _Bug-Jargal_ themselves belong to some extent to the class, and I am far from certain that the former is at all better than some of these _juvenilia_ of Balzac's. But as a whole they are of course little more than curiosities. Whether these curiosities are more widely known than they were some five-and-twenty, or thirty, years ago, when Mr. Louis Stevenson was the only friend of mine who had read them, and when even special writers on Balzac sometimes unblushingly confessed that they had not, I cannot say. Although printed in the little fifty-five-volume[160] edition which for so many years represented Balzac, they were excluded, as noted above, from the statelier "Definitive," and so may have once more "gone into abscondence." I do not want to read them again, but I no more repent the time once spent on them than I did earlier. In fact I really do not think any one ought to talk about Balzac who has not at least gained some knowledge of them, for many of their defects remained with him when he got rid of the others. These defects are numerous enough and serious enough. The books are nothing if not uncritical, generally extravagant, and sometimes (especially in _Jean Louis_) appallingly dull. Scarf-pins, made of poisoned fish-bones (_Argow le Pirate_), extinction of virgins under copper bells (_Le Centenaire_), attempts at fairy-tales (_La Derniere Fee_) jostle each other. The weaker historical kind figures largely in _L'Excommunie_ (one of the least bad), _L'Israelite_, _L'Heritiere de Birague_, _Dom Gigadas_. There is a _Vicaire des Ardennes_ (remarkably different from him of Wakefield), which is a kind of introduction to _Argow le Pirate_, and which, again, is not the worst. When I formerly wrote about these curious productions, after reading them, I had not read Pigault-Lebrun, and therefore did not