Considering the shorter length of his life the productiveness of Balzac was almost more astonishing, especially if we consider that some of his early work was never reprinted, and that he left great stores of fragments and unfinished sketches. He is, moreover, the most remarkable example in literature of untiring work and determination to achieve success despite the greatest discouragements. His early work was worse than unsuccessful, it was positively bad. After more than a score of unsuccessful attempts, _Les Chouans_ at last made its mark, and for twenty years from that time the astonishing productions composing the so-called _Comedie humaine_ were poured forth successively. The sub-titles which Balzac imposed upon the different batches, _Scenes de la vie parisienne_, _de la vie de province_, _de la vie intime_, &c., show, like the general title, a deliberate intention on the author's part to cover the whole ground of human, at least of French life. Such an attempt could not succeed wholly; yet the amount of success attained is astonishing. Balzac has, however, with some justice been accused of creating the world which he described, and his personages, wonderful as is the accuracy and force with which many of the characteristics of humanity are exemplified in them, are somehow not altogether human. Since these two great novelists, many others have arisen, partly to tread in their steps, partly to strike out independent paths. Octave Feuillet (1821-1890), beginning his career by apprenticeship to Alexandre Dumas and the historical novel, soon found his way in a very different style of composition, the _roman intime_ of fashionable life, in which, notwithstanding some grave defects, he attained much popularity and showed remarkable skill in keeping abreast of his time. The so-called realist side of Balzac was developed (but, as he himself acknowledged, with a double dose of intermixed if somewhat transformed Romanticism) by Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), who showed culture, scholarship and a literary power over the language inferior to that of no writer of the century. No novelist of his generation has attained a higher literary rank than Flaubert. _Madame Bovary_ and _L'Education sentimentale_ are studies of contemporary life; in _Salammbo_ and _La Tentation de Saint Antoine_ erudition and antiquarian knowledge furnish the subjects for the display of the highest literary skill. Of about the same date Edmond About (1828-1885), before he abandoned novel-writing, devoted himself chiefly to sketches of abundant but not always refined wit (_L'Homme a l'oreille cassee_, _Le Nez d'un notaire_), and sometimes to foreign scenes (_Tolla_, _Le Roi des montagnes_). Champfleury (Henri Husson, 1829-1889), a prolific critic, deserves notice for stories of the extravaganza kind. During the whole of the Second Empire one of the most popular writers was Ernest Feydeau (1821-1873), a writer of great