This is telling his readers fairly enough what they have to expect; and if after this they will persist in plunging headlong into the mud which nearly a century of constantly-increasing refinement has gone far to drag us out of ... why they must. As another reason why his pen has done ... what it has done, M. Balzac tells us that it is absolutely necessary to have something in a _genre_ unlike anything that the public has lately been familiar with. He says that the reading world (which is in fact all the world) "est las aujourd'hui" ... of a great many different styles of composition which he enumerates, summing up all with ... "et l'Histoire de France, Walter-Scottée.... Que nous reste-t-il donc?" he continues. "Si le public condamne les efforts des écrivains qui essaient de remettre en honneur la littérature _franche_ de nos ancêtres...." As another specimen of the theories of these new immortals, let me also quote the following sentence:--"Si Polyeucte n'existait pas, plus d'un poète moderne est capable de _refaire_ Corneille." Again, as a reason for going back to the tone of literature which he has chosen, he says,--"Les auteurs ont souvent raison dans leurs impertinences contre le tems présent. Le monde nous demande de belles peintures--où en seraient les types? Vos habits mesquins--vos révolutions manquées--vos bourgeois discoureurs--votre religion morte--vos pouvoirs éteints--vos rois en demi-solde--sont-ils donc si poétiques qu'il faille vous les transfigurer?... Nous ne pouvons aujourd'hui que nous moquer--la raillerie est toute la littérature des sociétés expirantes." M. Balzac concludes this curious essay on modern literature thus:--"Enfin, le tems présent marche si vite--la vie intellectuelle déborde partout avec tant de force, que plusieurs idées ont vieilli pendant que l'auteur imprimait son ouvrage." This last phrase is admirable, and gives the best and clearest idea of the notions of the school on the subject of composition that I have anywhere met with. Imagine Shakspeare and Spenser, Swift and Pope, Voltaire and Rousseau, publishing a work with a similar prefatory apology!... But M. Balzac is quite right. The ideas that are generated to-day will be old to-morrow, and dead and buried the day after. I should indeed be truly sorry to differ from him on this point; for herein lies the only consolation that the wisdom of man can suggest for the heavy calamity of witnessing the unprecedented perversion of the human understanding which marks the present hour. IT WILL NOT LAST: Common Sense will reclaim her rights, and our children will learn to laugh at these spasmodic efforts to be great and original as cordially as Cervantes did at the chronicles of knight-errantry which turned his hero's brain. LETTER LXXII. Breaking-up of the Paris season.--Soirée at Madame Récamier's.--Recitation.--Storm.--Disappointment.--Atonement. --Farewell.