SHAKESPEARE AND BALZAC.—Yacht life gives ample leisure. I had employed part of mine in making sketches. One laughs at one's extraordinary performances a day or two after one has completed them. Yet the attempt is worth making. It teaches one to admire less grudgingly the work of real artists who have conquered the difficulties. Books are less trying to vanity, for one is producing nothing of one's own, and submitting only to be interested or amused, if the author can succeed in either. One's appetite is generally good on these occasions, and one can devour anything; but in the pure primitive element of sea, and mountains, and unprogressive peasantry, I had become somehow fastidious. I tried a dozen novels one after the other without success; at last, perhaps the morning we left Elversdale, I found on the library shelves ”_Le Père Goriot_.” I had read a certain quantity of “Balzac” at other times, in deference to the high opinion entertained of him. N——, a fellow of Oriel, and once Member for Oxford, I remembered insisting to me that there was more knowledge of human nature in “Balzac” than in Shakespeare. I had myself observed in him a knowledge of a certain kind of human nature which Shakespeare let alone—a nature in which healthy vigor had been corrupted into a caricature by highly seasoned artificial civilization. Hothouse plants, in which the flowers had lost their grace of form and natural beauty, and had gained instead a poison-loaded and perfumed luxuriance, did not exist in Shakespeare's time, and if they had they would probably not have interested him. However, I had not read “_Le Père Goriot_,” and as I had been assured that it was the finest of Balzac's works, I sat down to it and deliberately read it through. My first impulse after it was over was to plunge into the sea to wash myself. As we were going ten knots, there were objections to this method of ablution, but I felt that I had been in abominable company. The book seemed to be the very worst ever written by a clever man. But it, and N——'s reference to Shakespeare, led me into a train of reflections. Le Père Goriot, like King Lear, has two daughters. Like Lear, he strips himself of his own fortune to provide for them in a distinguished manner. He is left to poverty and misery while his daughters live in splendor. Why is Lear so grand? Why is Le Père Goriot detestable? In the first place, all the company in Balzac are bad. Le Père Goriot is so wrapped up in his delightful children, that their very vices charm him, and their scented boudoirs seem a kind of Paradise. Lear, in the first scene of the play, acts and talks like an idiot, but still an idiot with a moral soul in him. Take Lear's own noble nature from him, take Kent away, and Edgar, and the fool, and Cordelia—and the actors in the play, it must be admitted, are abominable specimens of humanity—yet even so, leaving the story as it might have been if Marlowe had written