Suddenly the dying man raised himself by his wrists and cast on his frightened children a look which struck like lightning; the hairs that fringed the bald head stirred, the wrinkles quivered, the features were illumined with spiritual fires, a breath passed across that face and rendered it sublime; he raised a hand, clenched in fury, and uttered with a piercing cry the famous words of Archimedes, "EUREKA!"--"I have found." He fell back upon his bed with the dull sound of an inert body, and died, uttering an awful moan, his convulsed eyes expressing to the last, when the doctor closed them, the regret of not bequeathing to science the secret of an enigma whose veil was rent away--too late--by the fleshless fingers of death. The reader there has Balzac at his highest and best. Those desirous of acquainting themselves with some integral work of this author's will choose wisely if they choose any one of these four: "Pere Goriot," "Cesar Birotteau," "Modeste Mignon," "The Alkahest" ("The Search for the Absolute"). Mr. Saintsbury, a competent hand, edits a series of translations from Balzac, including the novels just named, together with everything else worth possessing from his industrious pen. 4. GEORGE SAND. In virile quality, Madame de Stael seemed _rediviva_, or should we keep the more familiar masculine gender, and say _redivivus_? in George Sand. "It only happened that she was a woman," said some one, of the latter personage; and indeed the chance that made her such seemed half on the point of being reversed by the choice of the subject herself. For, besides that she has her fame permanently under a pseudonym naturally betokening a man as its owner, it is a fact that she did, at one time, in order to greater freedom of the world, wear man's clothes and otherwise play the man among her Parisian fellows. This episode in her experience doubtless helped give her that great advantage over other women, which her genius enabled her to use to effect so surpassing, in describing the male human being such as he himself recognizes himself to be. The episode, however, was short, and George Sand is thought by her admirers--and her admirers include some very grave and self-respecting persons, the late Mr. Matthew Arnold being one example--never to have parted with a certain paradoxical womanly reserve and delicacy which ought logically to have been quite lost out of her nature through the coarse and soiled contacts to which she herself willingly, and even willfully, subjected it.