ave been speaking, and these observations
illustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever said
about the great civil war in America, so curiously far-fetched as the
following reflection:--'My best consolation is that an example on so
tremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through the
affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have a
strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrow
antagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of liberal
thought' (ii. 335).

In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all their
fulness. To a friend she writes (i. 179):--'You and Carlyle (have you
seen his article in last week's _Examiner?_) are the only two people who
feel just as I would have them--who can glory in what is actually great
and beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations and
incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the more
delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn't expect it. I feared that
you lacked revolutionary ardour. But no--you are just as
_sans-culottish_ and rash as I would have you. You are not one of those
sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are
too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any
great manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday existence.

'I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really
great movement--that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical
epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. I
would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sake
of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing
to the image of Christ, 'who first taught fraternity to men.' One
trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be
something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper
critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the
French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poem
if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautiful
face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his: it is worthy
of an aureole. I have little patience with people who can find time to
pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed
monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have an hospital for them,
or a sort of zoological gar