Balzac exacts more attention than most novel-readers are inclined to give; he is often repulsive, and not unfrequently dull; but the student who has once submitted to his charm becomes spell-bound. Disgusted for a moment, he returns again and again to the strange, hideous, grotesque, but most interesting world to which Balzac alone can introduce him. Like the opium-eater, he acquires a taste for the visions that are conjured up before him with so vivid a colouring, that he almost believes in their objective existence. There are perhaps greater novelists than Balzac; there are many who preach a purer morality; and many who give a far greater impression of general intellectual force; but in this one quality of intense realisation of actors and scenery he is unique. Balzac, indeed, was apparently himself almost incapable of distinguishing his dreams from realities. Great wits, we know, are allied to madness; and the boundaries seem in his case to have been most shadowy and indistinct. Indeed, if the anecdotes reported of him be accurate--some of them are doubtless rather overcharged--he must have lived almost in a state of permanent hallucination. This, for example, is a characteristic story. He inhabited for some years a house called _les Jardies_, in the neighbourhood of Paris. He had a difficulty in providing material furniture, owing to certain debts, which, as some sceptics insinuated, were themselves a vast mystification. He habitually ascribed his poverty to a certain 'deficit Kessner,' a loss which reposed on some trifling foundation of facts, but which assumed monstrous proportions in his imagination, and recurred perpetually as the supposed cause of his poverty. In sober reality, however, he was poor, and found compensation in creating a vast credit, as imaginary as his liabilities. Upon that bank he could draw without stint. He therefore inscribed in one place upon the bare walls of his house, 'Ici un revetement de marbre de Paros;' in another, 'Ici un plafond peint par Eugene Delacroix;' in a third, 'Ici des portes, facon Trianon;' and, in short, revelled in gorgeous decorations made of the same materials as the dishes of the Barmecides' feast. A minor source of wealth was the single walnut-tree which really grew in his gardens, and which increased his dream-revenue by 60_l._ a year. This extraordinary result was due, not to any merit in the nuts, but to an ancient and imaginary custom of the village which compelled the inhabitants to deposit round its foot a material defined by Victor Hugo as 'du guano moins les oiseaux.' The most singular story, however, and which we presume is to be received with a certain reserve, tells how he roused two of his intimate friends at two o'clock one morning, and urged them to start for India without an hour's delay. The cause of this journey was that a certain German historian had presented Balzac with a seal, valued by the thoughtless at the sum of six sous.