But if any one be of taste sufficiently like mine to find disappointment of the unpleasant kind in _Cinq-Mars_, I think I can promise him an agreeable, if somewhat chequered, surprise when, remembering _Cinq-Mars_ and basing his expectations upon it, he turns to _Stello_. It is true that the book is, as a whole, even less "precisely a novel" than Sainte-Beuve's _Volupte_. But for that very reason it escapes the display of the disabilities which _Cinq-Mars_, being, or incurring obligation to be, precisely a novel, suffers. It is true also that it exhibits that fancy for putting historical persons in the first "plan" which he had avowed, and over which heads have been shaken. The bulk of it, indeed, consists of romanticised _histoires_ or historiettes (the narrator calls them "anecdotes") of the sad and famous fates of two French poets, Gilbert and Andre Chenier, and of our English Chatterton. But, then, no one of these can be called "a dominant historical personage," and the known facts permit themselves to be, and are, "romanticised" effectively enough. So the flower is in each case plucked from the nettle. And there is another flower of more positive and less compensatory kind which blooms here, which is particularly welcome to some readers, and which, from _Cinq-Mars_ alone, they could hardly have expected to find in any garden of Alfred de Vigny's. For this springs from a root of ironic wit which almost approaches humour, which, though never merry, is not seldom merciful, and is very seldom actually savage, though often sad. Now irony is, to those who love it, the saving grace of everything that possesses it, almost equal in charm, and still more nearly equal in power, to the sheer beauty, which can dispense with it, but which sometimes, and not so very rarely, is found in its company. [Sidenote: Its framework and "anecdotes."]