had been, for twenty years, a weak,
amorphous, discreditable, and discredited government; and there was a
great deal of revolutionary spirit, old and new, about. So France
determined--in a word unacademic but tempting--to "revolute," and she
"revoluted" at discretion, or indiscretion, to the top of her bent. This
part of _Jerome Paturot_ gives a minute and (having had a good deal to
do with the study both of history and of politics in my time), I think I
may say boldly, a faithful account of _how_ she did it. And I think,
further, that, if at least some of the innocent folk who the other day
hailed the dawn of the Russian revolution had been acquainted with the
book, they might have been less jubilant; while acquaintance would have
helped others to anticipate the actual consequences. And I wish that
some one would, in some form or other, bring its contents before those
who, without being actual scoundrels, utter fanatics, or hopeless
fools, want to bring revolution nearer home. Reybaud brings out, too
verbosely and heavily perhaps, but with absolute truth and justice, the
waste, the folly, the absolute illogicality of the popular cries,
movements, everything. "Labour" was, happily, not then organised in
France as it is in England to-day. But if any one would extract, and
translate in a pamphlet form, the dying speech of the misguided tool
Comtois in reference to his misleader, the typical "shop-steward"
Percheron, he would do a mighty good deed.

Still, of course this is a parenthesis; and the parenthesis is a thing
hateful, I am told, perhaps not to gods but to some men.

* * * * *

Students of literature, even in a single language, much more in wider
range, are well acquainted with a class of writers, largely increased
since the introduction of printing, and more largely still since that of
"periodicals," who enjoy a considerable--sometimes almost a
great--reputation in their own time, and then are not so much
discredited or disapproved as simply forgotten. They disappear, and
their habitation is hardly even the dust-bin; it is the _oubliette_; and
their places are taken by others whose fates are _not_ other. In fact,
they are, in the famous phrase, "Priests who slay the slayer," etc.

[Sidenote: Mery.]

Of these, in French, I myself hardly know a more remarkable example than
Joseph Mery, who, born two years before the end of the eighteenth
century, lived for just two-thirds of the