We have reserved until the present a novelist of France who may ultimately be counted the greatest master of modern fiction. He was a contemporary of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, but he took no part in the romantic movement. Indeed, the critics of his own day would have nothing to do with him. His works, far more numerous than Scott’s and almost as bulky, sold in sufficient numbers to enable him to pay the debts his lack of business experience caused him to contract in various speculations; but even his own fellow citizens of Tours snubbed him so unmercifully that in sorrow he decided not to give to that town his large and valuable library, as he had intended to do. Only recently have his books been adequately translated into English, and now only a portion are accessible. He is the last great classic to come upon the stage; and the most thoughtful young writers of to-day whisper among themselves that the Master is Balzac. Victor Hugo, Dumas, George Sand, the representatives of the romantic movement, are fascinating story-tellers, but they are not true to human nature. Their works abound in glaring faults in the grammar of human life. They were so wrapped up in the thrills their tales were to excite that they had small time to think seriously about the minuter facts. They have never analysed the principles of life. What observation chanced to bring them they used in the most effective way; and as we read Les Miserables and Consuelo we are shocked at every point by the inconsistency of the characters, the false ring of the speeches they make and the acts they perform. The colour has been laid on thick and hot, and flames with overpowering brilliancy; but the drawing will not bear close inspection. In Scott we find no such inaccuracies of characterization, however many faults of grammar there may be. The Englishman is a master at characterization, and in no great English novelists do we find the inaccuracies of thought and feeling which characterized the French romancers. But in all Scott’s pageantry, with his hundreds of figures, we find but relatively few types, and even they are not very profound or wonderful. They are the common, everyday men Scott knew, dressed up in the clothes of history and romance. And though they are all true enough as far as they go, the same type appears again and again with a different feather in his cap and a fresh name to be hailed by. And Dickens and Thackeray have drawn but a few types, those they themselves had come personally in contact with and known by habit and instinct. These they have immortalized, and repeated often enough for us to understand them in all their phases. The types in their books are drawn unconsciously. They were no deep students of the varieties of human nature, nor of the underlying principles of life. Their time and effort were devoted to the art of representation, in which, each in his own peculiar line, they excelled all other men.