n lose the Democratic Enthusiasm in proportion as they
find reason to suspect or despise their kind. And if there were not
hopes for the Future, which this hard, practical daily life does not
suffice to teach us, the vision and the glory that belong to the Great
Popular Creed, dimmed beneath the injustice, the follies, and the vices
of the world as it is, would fade into the lukewarm sectarianism of
temporary Party. Moreover, Vaudemont's habits of thought and reasoning
were those of the camp, confirmed by the systems familiar to him in the
East: he regarded the populace as a soldier enamoured of discipline and
order usually does. His theories, therefore, or rather his ignorance of
what is sound in theory, went with Charles the Tenth in his excesses,
but not with the timidity which terminated those excesses by
dethronement and disgrace. Chafed to the heart, gnawed with proud grief,
he obeyed the royal mandates, and followed the exiled monarch: his hopes
overthrown, his career in France annihilated forever. But on entering
England, his temper, confident and ready of resource, fastened itself
on new food. In the land where he had no name he might yet rebuild his
fortunes. It was an arduous effort--an improbable hope; but the words
heard by the bridge of Paris--words that had often cheered him in his
exile through hardships and through dangers which it is unnecessary to
our narrative to detail--yet rung again in his ear, as he leaped on his
native land,--"Time, Faith, Energy."

While such his character in the larger and more distant relations
of life, in the closer circles of companionship many rare and
noble qualities were visible. It is true that he was stern, perhaps
imperious--of a temper that always struggled for command; but he was
deeply susceptible of kindness, and, if feared by those who opposed,
loved by those who served him. About his character was that mixture of
tenderness and fierceness which belonged, of old, to the descriptions of
the warrior. Though so little unlettered, Life had taught him a certain
poetry of sentiment and idea--More poetry, perhaps, in the silent
thoughts that, in his happier moments, filled his solitude, than in half
the pages that his brother had read and written by the dreaming lake. A
certain largeness of idea and nobility of impulse often made him act
the sentiments of which bookmen write. With all his passions, he held
licentiousness in disdain; with all his ambition for the power of