THE HISTORIANS.--Even the historians of this first half of the century were poets: Augustin Thierry, who reconstituted scientifically but imaginatively _The Merovingian Era_; Michelet, pupil of Vico, who saw in history the development of an immense poem and cast over his account of the Middle Ages the fire and feverishness of his ardent imagination and tremulous sensitiveness. Guizot and Thiers can be left apart, for they were statesmen by education and, although capable of passion, sought the one to rationally generalise and "discipline history," as was said, the other solely to capture facts accurately and to set them out clearly in orderly fashion. THE PHILOSOPHERS.--The philosophers were not sheltered from this contagion, and if Cousin and his eclectic school loved to attach themselves to the seventeenth century both in mind and style, Lamennais, first in his _Essay on Indifference_, then in his _Study of a Philosophy_ and in his _Words of a Believer_, impassioned, impetuous, and febrile, underwent the influence of romanticism, but also gave to the romantics the greater portion of the ideas they put in verse. THE NOVEL.--As for the novel, it was only natural that it should be deeply affected by the spirit of the new school. George Sand wrote lyrical novels, if the phrase may be used--and, as I think, it is here the accurate expression--entitled _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Mauprat_, and especially _Lelia_. She was to impart wisdom later on. It even happened that a mind born to see reality in an admirably accurate manner, saw it so only by reason of the times, or at least partly due to the times, associated it with a magnifying but deforming imagination converting it into a literary megalomania; and this was the case of Honoré de Balzac. NON-ROMANTIC LITERATURE.--Nevertheless, as was only natural, throughout the whole of the romantic epoch there was an entire literature which did not submit to its influence, and simply carried on the tradition of the eighteenth century. In poetry there was the witty, malicious, and very often highly exalted Béranger, whose songs are almost always excellent songs and sometimes are odes; and there was also the able and dexterous but frigid Casimir Delavigne. In prose there was Benjamin Constant, supremely oratorical and a very luminous orator, also a religious philosopher in his work _On Religions_, and a novelist in his admirable _Adolphus_, which was semi-autobiographical.