converting it into a literary megalomania; and this was the case of
Honore 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 Beranger, 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.

Classical also were Joseph de Maistre, in his political considerations
(_Evenings in St. Petersburg_), and, in fiction, Merimee, accurate,
precise, trenchant, and cultured; finally in criticism, Sainte-Beuve, who
began, it is true, by being the theorist and literary counsellor of
romanticism, but who was soon freed from the spell, almost from 1830, and
became author of _Port Royal_. Though possessing a wide and receptive
mind because he was personified intelligence, he was decisively classical
in his preferences, sentiments, ideas, and even in his style.

Stendhal, pure product of the eighteenth century, and even exaggerating
the spirit of that century in the dryness of his soul and of his style, a
pure materialist writing with precision and with natural yet intentional
nakedness, possessed valuable gifts of observation, and in his famous
novel, _Red and Black_, in the first part of the _Chartreuse of Parma_,
and in his _Memoirs of a Tourist_, knew how to draw characters with
exactness, sobriety, and power, and to set them in reliefs that were