this second line of defence, attacks at once the issue of his author’s general ideas—matters apt to be, in any group of contributors to a “series” of our own, exactly what the contributor most shirks considering. It is true that few writers, and especially few novelists, bring up that question with anything like the gross assurance and systematic confidence of Balzac, who clearly took for involved in his plan of a complete picture of the manners and aspects of his country and his period that he should have his confident “say” about as many things as possible, and who, throughout his immense work, appears never for an instant or in any connection to flinch from that complacency. Here it is easy to await him, waylay him and catch him in the act, with the consequence, for the most part, of our having to recognise almost with compassion the disparity between the author of “La Cousine Bette” exercising his genius, as Matthew Arnold said of Ruskin, in making a like distinction, and the same writer taking on a character not in the least really rooted in that soil. The fact none the less than his generalising remains throughout so markedly inferior to his particularising—which latter element and very essence of the novelist’s art it was his greatness to carry further and apply more consistently than any member of the craft, without exception, has felt the impulse, to say nothing of finding the way, to do—by no means wholly destroys the interest of the habit itself or relieves us of a due attention to it; so characteristic and significant, so suggestive even of his special force, though in a manner indirect, are the very folds and redundancies of this philosopher’s robe that flaps about his feet and drags along the ground like an assumed official train. The interest here—where it is exactly that a whole face of his undertaking would be most illumined for the fellow-artist we imagine trying to exhibit him—depends much less on what his reflection and opinion, his irrepressible _obiter dicta_ and monstrous _suffisances_ of judgment may be, than on the part played in his scheme by his holding himself ready at every turn and at such short notice to judge. For this latter fact probably lights up more than any other his conception of the range of the novel, the fashion after which, in his hands, it had been felt as an all-inclusive form, a form without rift or leak, a tight mould, literally, into which everything relevant to a consideration of the society surrounding him—and the less relevant unfortunately, as well as the more—might be poured in a stream of increasing consistency, the underlapping subject stretched, all so formidably, to its own constituted edge and the compound appointed to reproduce, as in finest and subtlest relief, its every minutest feature, overlying and corresponding with it all round to the loss of no fraction of an inch.