ep,
and that is what is commonly called a Revolution. Now, I know what that
is. I have gone, not indeed through a revolution, but an attempt at
one."

Leonard raised his eyes towards his master with a look of profound
respect, and great curiosity.

"Yes," added Riccabocca, and the face on which the boy gazed exchanged
its usual grotesque and sardonic expression for one animated, noble, and
heroic. "Yes, not a revolution for chimeras, but for that cause which
the coldest allow to be good, and which, when successful, all time
approves as divine--the redemption of our native soil from the rule of
the foreigner! I have shared in such an attempt. And," continued the
Italian mournfully, "recalling now all the evil passions it arouses, all
the ties it dissolves, all the blood that it commands to flow, all the
healthful industry it arrests, all the madmen that it arms, all the
victims that it dupes, I question whether one man really honest, pure,
and humane, who has once gone through such an ordeal, would ever hazard
it again, unless he was assured that the victory was certain--ay, and
the object for which he fights not to be wrested from his hands amidst
the uproar of the elements that the battle has released."

The Italian paused, shaded his brow with his hand, and remained long
silent. Then, gradually resuming his ordinary tone, he continued:

"Revolutions that have no definite objects made clear by the positive
experience of history; revolutions, in a word, that aim less at
substituting one law or one dynasty for another, than at changing the
whole scheme of society, have been little attempted by real statesmen.
Even Lycurgus is proved to be a myth who never existed. They are the
suggestions of philosophers who lived apart from the actual world, and
whose opinions (though generally they were very benevolent, good sort of
men, and wrote in an elegant poetical style) one would no more take on a
plain matter of life, than one would look upon Virgil's _Eclogues_ as a
faithful picture of the ordinary pains and pleasures of the peasants who
tend our sheep. Read them as you would read poets, and they are
delightful. But attempt to shape the world according to the poetry--and
fit yourself for a madhouse. The farther off the age is from the
realization of such projects, the more these poor philosophers have
indulged them. Thus, it was amidst the saddest corruption of court
manners, that it became the fashion in Paris to sit for