The other paper of which we desire to speak in this connection, is one treating of the French novelists prominent at the time, and in particular of Balzac, Eugène Sue, and De Vigny. Of these three names, the first alone retains the prestige which it had when Margaret wrote her essay. De Vigny, remarkable mostly for purity of sentiment, finish of style, and a power of setting and limiting his pictures, is a _boudoir_ author, and one read only in boudoirs of studious refinement. Sue, to whose motives Margaret gives the most humanitarian interpretation, has failed to commend his method to posterity. His autopsy of a diseased state of society is thought to spread too widely the infection of the evils which he deplores. His intention is also too humane for the present day. The world of the last decade and of the present is too deeply wedded to the hard worship of money to be touched by the pathos of women who perish, or of men who starve. The grievances of the poor against the rich find to-day no one to give ear to them, and few even to utter them; since those who escape starvation are too busy with beggary and plunder to waste time in such useless musings. Of the three here cited, Balzac alone remains a king among novelists; and Margaret's study of him imports as much to us to-day as it did to the world of her time. She begins by commenting upon the lamentation general at that time, and not uncommon in this, over the depravity of taste and of life already becoming familiar to the youth of America through the medium of the French novel. Concerning this, she says:-- "It is useless to bewail what is the inevitable result of the movement of our time. Europe must pour her corruptions no less than her riches on our shores, both in the form of books and of living men. She cannot, if she would, check the tide which bears them hitherward. No defences are possible, on our vast extent of shore, that can preclude their ingress. Our only hope lies in rousing in our own community a soul of goodness, a wise aspiration, that shall give us strength to assimilate this unwholesome food to better substance, or to cast off its contaminations." In view of the translation and republication of these works, Margaret remarks that it would be desirable for our people to know something of the position which the writers occupy in their own country. She says, moreover, what we would fain hope may be true to-day, that "our imitation of Europe does not yet go so far that the American milliner can be depended on to copy anything from the Parisian grisette, except her cap." Margaret speaks at some length of Balzac's novel "Le Père Goriot," which she had just read. "The author," she says, "reminds one of the Spanish romancers in the fearlessness with which he takes mud into his hands, and dips his foot in slime. We cannot endure this when done, as by most Frenchmen, with an air of recklessness and gayety; but Balzac does it with the stern manliness of a Spaniard."