more recent school, who have turned to account all the most refined methods of breaking the ten commandments and the criminal code; the fault of the so-called sensation writer is, not that he deals in murder, bigamy, or adultery--every great writer likes to use powerful situations--but that he relies upon our interest in startling crimes to distract our attention from feebly-drawn characters and conventional details. Balzac does not often fall into that weakness. If his criminals are frequently of the most outrageous kind, and indulge even in practices unmentionable, the crime is intended at least to be of secondary interest. He tries to fix our attention on the passions by which they are caused, and to attract us chiefly by the legitimate method of analysing human nature--even, it must be confessed, in some of its most abnormal manifestations. Macbeth is not interesting because he commits half-a-dozen murders; but the murders are interesting because they are committed by Macbeth. We may generally say as much for Balzac's villains; and it is the only justification for a free use of blood and brutality. In applying these remarks, we come to the real secret of Balzac's power, which will demand a fuller consideration. It is common to say of all great novelists, and of Balzac in particular, that they display a wonderful 'knowledge of the human heart.' The chief objection to the phrase is that such knowledge does not exist. Nobody has as yet found his way through the complexities of that intricate machine, and described the springs and balances by which its movement is originated and controlled. Men of vivid imagination are in some respects less competent for such a work than their neighbours. They have not the cool, hard, and steady hand required for psychological dissection. Balzac gave a queer specimen of his own incapacity in an attempt to investigate the true history of a real murder, celebrated in its day, and supposed by everybody but Balzac to have been committed by one Peytel, who was put to death in spite of his pleading. His skill in devising motives for imaginary atrocities was a positive disqualification for dealing with facts and legal evidence. The greatest poet or novelist describes only one person, and that is himself; and he differs from his inferiors, not necessarily in having a more systematic knowledge, but in having wider sympathies, and so to speak, possessing a great number of characters. Cervantes was at once Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Shakespeare was Hamlet and Mercutio and Othello and Falstaff; Scott was at once Dandie Dinmont and the Antiquary and the Master of Ravenswood; and Balzac embodies his different phases of feeling in Eugenie Grandet and Vautrin and the Pere Goriot. The assertion that he knew the human heart must be interpreted to mean that he could sympathise with, and give expression to, a wide range of human passions; as his supposed knowledge of the world implies merely that he was deeply