I thought the intellectual Frenchman, in the extreme of want, never sunk into the inert reverie of the lazzaroni, nor hid the vulture of famine beneath the mantle of pride with the bitter mood of a Spaniard. But Balzac evidently is familiar with that which makes the agony of poverty--its vulgarity. Dirt, confusion, shabby expedients, living to live,--these are what make poverty terrible and odious, and in these Balzac would seem to have been steeped to the very lips. These French writers possess the art of plunging at once _in medias res_, and Balzac places you, in the twinkling of an eye, in one of the lowest boarding-houses of Paris. At first all is dirt, hubbub, and unsavory odors; but from the vapors of the caldron evolves a web of many-colored life, of terrible pathos, and original humor, not unenlivened by pale golden threads of beauty, which had better never been. All the characters are excellently drawn: the harpy mistress of the house; Mlle. Michonnet the spy, and her imbecile lover; Mme. Coutuner, with her purblind strivings after virtue, and her real, though meagre respectability; Vautrim, the disguised galley-slave, with his cynical philosophy and Bonaparte character; and the young students of medicine, cheering the dense fog with the scintillations of their wit, and the joyousness and petulance with which their age meets the most adverse circumstances, at least in France! The connection between this abject poverty and the highest luxury of Parisian life is made naturally by Eugene, connected to his misfortune with a noble family, of which his own is a poor and young branch, studying a profession and sighing to live like a duke, and _Le Pere Goriot_, who has stripped himself of all his wealth for his daughters, who are more naturally unnatural than those of Lear. The transitions are made with as much swiftness as a curtain is drawn upon the stage, yet with no feeling of abruptness, so skilfully are the incidents woven into one another. And be it recorded to the credit of Balzac, that, much as he appears to have suffered from the want of wealth, the vices which pollute it are represented with as terrible force as those of poverty. The book affords play for similar powers, and brings a similar range of motives into action with Scott's "Fortunes of Nigel." If less rich than that work, it is more original, and has a force of pencil all its own.