first years, between 1819 and 1822, we have a good number of letters
to Laure; between 1822 and 1829, when he first made his mark, very
few. He began, of course, with verse, for which he never had the
slightest vocation, and, almost equally of course, with a tragedy. But
by degrees and apparently pretty soon, he slipped into what was his
vocation, and like some, though not very many, great writers, at first
did little better in it than if it had not been his vocation at all.
The singular tentatives which, after being allowed for a time a sort
of outhouse in the structure of the _Comedie Humaine_, were excluded
from the octavo _Edition Definitive_ five-and-twenty years ago, have
never been the object of that exhaustive bibliographical and critical
attention which has been bestowed on those which follow them. They
were not absolutely unproductive--we hear of sixty, eighty, a hundred
pounds being paid for them, though whether this was the amount of
Balzac's always sanguine expectations, or hard cash actually handed
over, we cannot say. They were very numerous, though the reprints
spoken of above never extended to more than ten. Even these have never
been widely read. The only person I ever knew till I began this
present task who had read them through was the friend whom all his
friends are now lamenting and are not likely soon to cease to lament,
Mr. Louis Stevenson; and when I once asked him whether, on his honor
and conscience, he could recommend me to brace myself to the same
effort, he said that on his honor and conscience he must most
earnestly dissuade me. I gather, though I am not sure, that Mr.
Wedmore, the latest writer in English on Balzac at any length, had not
read them through when he wrote.

Now I have, and a most curious study they are. Indeed I am not sorry,
as Mr. Wedmore thinks one would be. They are curiously, interestingly,
almost enthrallingly bad. Couched for the most part in a kind of