admirer of Thackeray to deny that the author of _Vanity Fair_, who was
in Paris and narrowly watching French literature and French life at
the very time of Balzac's most exuberant flourishing and education,
owed something to the author of _Le Pere Goriot_. There was no copying
or imitation; the lessons taught by Balzac were too much blended with
those of native masters, such as Fielding, and too much informed and
transformed by individual genius. Some may think--it is a point at
issue not merely between Frenchmen and Englishmen, but between good
judges of both nations on each side--that in absolute veracity and
likeness to life, in limiting the operation of the inner consciousness
on the outward observation to strictly artistic scale, Thackeray
excelled Balzac as far as he fell short of him in the powers of the
seer and in the gigantic imagination of the prophet. But the relations
of pupil and master in at least some degree are not, I think,
deniable.

So things went on in light and in shade, in homekeeping and in travel,
in debts and in earnings, but always in work of some kind or another,
for eighteen years from the turning point of 1829. By degrees, as he
gained fame and ceased to be in the most pressing want of money,
Balzac left off to some extent, though never entirely, those
miscellaneous writings--reviews (including puffs), comic or general
sketches, political diatribes, "physiologies" and the like--which,
with his discarded prefaces and much more interesting matter, were at
last, not many years ago, included in four stout volumes of the
_Edition Definitive_. With the exception of the _Physiologies_ (a sort
of short satiric analysis of this or that class, character, or
personage), which were very popular in the reign of Louis Philippe in
France, and which Albert Smith and others introduced into England,
Balzac did not do any of this miscellaneous work extremely well. Very