clack and mair o' yer Jairman wine!" Only, in human respect and other,
we phrase it: "Oh, dear M. de Balzac! give us more _Eugenie Grandets_,
more _Pere Goriots_, more _Peaux de Chagrin_, and don't talk about
what you do not understand!"

Balzac was a great politician also, and here, though he may not have
been very much more successful, he talked with more knowledge and
competence. He must have given himself immense trouble in reading the
papers, foreign as well as French; he had really mastered a good deal
of the political religion of a French publicist. It is curious to
read, sixty years after date, his grave assertion that "_La France a
la conquete de Madagascar a faire_," and with certain very pardonable
defects (such as his Anglophobia), his politics may be pronounced not
unintelligent and not ungenerous, though somewhat inconsistent and not
very distinctly traceable to any coherent theory. As for the
Anglophobia, the Englishman who thinks the less of him for that must
have very poor and unhappy brains. A Frenchman who does not more or
less hate and fear England, an Englishman who does not regard France
with a more or less good-humored impatience, is usually "either a god
or a beast," as Aristotle saith. Balzac began with an odd but not
unintelligible compound, something like Hugo's, of Napoleonism and
Royalism. In 1824, when he was still in the shades of anonymity, he
wrote and published two by no means despicable pamphlets in favor of
Primogeniture and the Jesuits, the latter of which was reprinted in
1880 at the last _Jesuitenhetze_ in France. His _Lettres sur Paris_ in
1830-31, and his _La France et l'Etranger_ in 1836, are two
considerable series of letters from "Our Own Correspondent," handling
the affairs of the world with boldness and industry if not invariably
with wisdom. They rather suggest (as does the later _Revue Parisienne_
still more) the political writing of the age of Anne in England, and