, what can History do with it; if not drop a tear
over it, almost in silence? First of the two-year Parliaments of France,
which, if Paper Constitution and oft-repeated National Oath could avail
aught, were to follow in softly-strong indissoluble sequence while Time
ran,--it had to vanish dolefully within one year; and there came no
second like it. Alas! your biennial Parliaments in endless indissoluble
sequence; they, and all that Constitutional Fabric, built with such
explosive Federation Oaths, and its top-stone brought out with dancing
and variegated radiance, went to pieces, like frail crockery, in the
crash of things; and already, in eleven short months, were in that Limbo
near the Moon, with the ghosts of other Chimeras. There, except for rare
specific purposes, let them rest, in melancholy peace.

On the whole, how unknown is a man to himself; or a public Body of men
to itself! Aesop's fly sat on the chariot-wheel, exclaiming, What a dust
I do raise! Great Governors, clad in purple with fasces and insignia,
are governed by their valets, by the pouting of their women and
children; or, in Constitutional countries, by the paragraphs of their
Able Editors. Say not, I am this or that; I am doing this or that! For
thou knowest it not, thou knowest only the name it as yet goes by. A
purple Nebuchadnezzar rejoices to feel himself now verily Emperor
of this great Babylon which he has builded; and is a nondescript
biped-quadruped, on the eve of a seven-years course of grazing! These
Seven Hundred and Forty-five elected individuals doubt not but they are
the First biennial Parliament, come to govern France by parliamentary
eloquence: and they are what? And they have come to do what? Things
foolish and not wise!

It is much lamented by many that this First Biennial had no members
of the old Constituent in it, with their experience of parties and
parliamentary tactics; that such was their foolish Self-denying Law.
Most surely, old members of the Constituent had been welcome to us here.
But, on the other hand, what old or what new members of any Constituent
under the Sun could have effectually profited? There are First biennial
Parliaments so postured as to be, in a sense, beyond wisdom; where
wisdom and folly differ only in degree, and wreckage and dissolution are
the appointed issue for both.

Old-Constituents, your Barnaves, Lameths and the like, for whom a
special Gallery has been set apart, where they may sit in honour