that suggested to Balzac innumerable shades and innuendoes of thought, and _aperçus_ on every form and phase of life. Kemény, like Balzac, had studied much in books and nature and man; he also had that love of realism—that following up of mental or emotional waves into their minutest recesses in the face or voice or gestures of persons. The outward or material appearance of man: his dress, house, arms, art-work, or contrivances were a matter of profound study to Kemény, as they were to Balzac. Although intensely analytical, he is equally great at and fond of descriptions. He paints nature, more especially that of his beloved Transylvania, as one intimate with mountains, rivers and forests. He knows their language and physiognomy; his landscapes are like the choruses in Greek tragedies. They form part of the scenes; not only of the scenery. They are like the contrapuntal bass to the melodies of his novels. But in what Kemény resembles Balzac most is his inexorableness. There is no other word for it. In nearly all his novels, as in most of those of Balzac, man is crushed down pitilessly, remorselessly. Without making any deliberate show of pessimism, Kemény is intensely pessimistic. As in Balzac the overpowering demon of modern times is money, after which all crave, all run and rush, jostling, panting, jading; so in Kemény, the bane of man appears under the form of those small mistakes and errors which dig the grave of all hopes. The great passions, vices and crimes do not, in Kemény’s novels, act as the causes of the final downfall of his heroes or heroines. His heroes do not die from strokes of lightning, shooting forth from the black clouds of their terrible passions or heinous crimes. On the contrary: such lightnings rather illumine their road to success. They end, as it were, through a fire caused by a carelessly dropped match. The ghastly irony of real life, which no unbiassed observer can have failed to notice, is shown in his novels in all its terrible working. The melancholy of Eötvös is sweet and soothing; the gloom of Kemény is discomforting, distressing, just because Kemény never seems to be deliberately pessimistic. While reading his novels, the reader is so struck with the beauty of those gems of original and profound ideas and remarks, which Kemény strews in prodigious abundance over the objects and persons of his novels, that the persistent gloom and despair dominating nearly all his works, do not become so painful to the reader. It is when we have finished the book; when we overlook the whole of the plan; when we have laid our ear on the throbbing heart of each of the persons with whom we had been through several volumes; it is when the novel in its entirety has entered our mind, that we feel deserted by all hopefulness, and embittered by the foul destiny reigning over man’s best efforts. There can be but little doubt that the indifference, with which Kemény has been so far received in Hungary, is largely owing to his pessimism.