shrewd observations are to be found in his reviews, for instance his
indication, in reviewing La Touche's _Fragoletta_, of that common
fault of ambitious novels, a sort of woolly and "ungraspable"
looseness of construction and story, which constantly bewilders the
reader as to what is going on. But, as a rule, he was thinking too
much of his own work and his own principles of working to enter very
thoroughly into the work of others. His politics, those of a moderate
but decided Royalist and Conservative, were, as has been said,
intelligent in theory, but in practice a little distinguished by that
neglect of actual business detail which has been noticed in his
speculations.

At last, in the summer of 1847, it seemed as if the Rachel for whom he
had served nearly if not quite the full fourteen years already, and
whose husband had long been out of the way, would at last grant
herself to him. He was invited to Vierzschovnia in the Ukraine, the
seat of Madame Hanska, or in strictness of her son-in-law, Count
Georges Mniszech; and as the visit was apparently for no restricted
period, and Balzac's pretensions to the lady's hand were notorious, it
might have seemed that he was as good as accepted. But to assume this
would have been to mistake what perhaps the greatest creation of
Balzac's great English contemporary and counterpart on the one side,
as Thackeray was his contemporary and counterpart on the other,
considered to be the malignity of widows. What the reasons were which
made Madame Hanska delay so long in doing what she did at last, and
might just as well, it would seem, have done years before, is not
certainly known, and it would be quite unprofitable to discuss them.
But it was on the 8th of October 1847 that Balzac first wrote to his
sister from Vierzschovnia, and it was not till the 14th of March 1850
that, "in the parish church of Saint Barbara at Berditchef, by the