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."]

The substance, or rather the framework, of _Stello, ou Les Diables
Bleus_, requires very little amplification of its double title to
explain it. Putting that title in charade form, one might say that its
first is a young poet who suffers from its second--like many other young
persons, poetical and unpoetical, of times Romantic and un-Romantic.
Having an excessively bad fit of his complaint, he sends for a certain
_docteur noir_ to treat the case. This "Black Doctor" is not a
trout-fly, nor the sort of person who might be expected in a story of
_diablerie_. It is even suggested that he derived the name, by which he
was known to society, from the not specially individual habit of wearing
black clothes. But there must have been something not quite ordinarily
human about him, inasmuch as, having been resident in London at the time
of Chatterton's death in 1770, he was--apparently without any signs of
Old Parr-like age--a fashionable doctor at Paris in the year 1832. His
visit ends, as usual, in a prescription, but a prescription of a very
unusual kind. The bulk of it consists of the "anecdotes"--again perhaps
not a very uncommon feature of a doc