'It is a habit of theirs,' says he, 'to
stop travellers, were it even by constraint, and inquire whatsoever
each of them may have heard or known about any sort of matter: in their
towns, the common people beset the passing trader; demanding to hear
from what regions he came, what things he got acquainted with there.
Excited by which rumours and hearsays they will decide about the
weightiest matters; and necessarily repent next moment that they did it,
on such guidance of uncertain reports, and many a traveller answering
with mere fictions to please them, and get off.' (De Bello Gallico,
iv. 5.) Nineteen hundred years; and good Dampmartin, wayworn, in winter
frost, probably with scant light of stars and fish-oil, still perorates
from the Inn-window! This People is no longer called Gaulish; and it has
wholly become braccatus, has got breeches, and suffered change enough:
certain fierce German Franken came storming over; and, so to speak,
vaulted on the back of it; and always after, in their grim tenacious
way, have ridden it bridled; for German is, by his very name,
Guerre-man, or man that wars and gars. And so the People, as we say, is
now called French or Frankish: nevertheless, does not the old Gaulish
and Gaelic Celthood, with its vehemence, effervescent promptitude, and
what good and ill it had, still vindicate itself little adulterated?--

For the rest, that in such prurient confusion, Clubbism thrives and
spreads, need not be said. Already the Mother of Patriotism, sitting
in the Jacobins, shines supreme over all; and has paled the poor lunar
light of that Monarchic Club near to final extinction. She, we say,
shines supreme, girt with sun-light, not yet with infernal lightning;
reverenced, not without fear, by Municipal Authorities; counting her
Barnaves, Lameths, Petions, of a National Assembly; most gladly of all,
her Robespierre. Cordeliers, again, your Hebert, Vincent, Bibliopolist
Momoro, groan audibly that a tyrannous Mayor and Sieur Motier harrow
them with the sharp tribula of Law, intent apparently to suppress them
by tribulation. How the Jacobin Mother-Society, as hinted formerly,
sheds forth Cordeliers on this hand, and then Feuillans on that; the
Cordeliers on this hand, and then Feuillans on that; the Cordeliers
'an elixir or double-distillation of Jacobin Patriotism;' the other a
wide-spread weak dilution thereof; how she will re-absorb the former
into her Mother-bosom, and stormfully dissipate the lat