as a poetical abstraction, an impracticable Utopist;
and yet he was the only man in the Chamber who had devised a
practical means of regenerating the people and the government.
Lamartine was now considered a parliamentary oddity rather than the
leader of a faction, or the representative of a political principle;
but he was indeed far in advance of the miserable routine of his
colleagues. He personated, indeed, no principle represented in the
Chamber, but he was already the Tribune of the unrepresented masses!
The people had declared the government a fraud--the Chamber an
embodied falsehood. At last Marrast, one of the editors of the
National, (now a member of the provisional government,) pronounced it
in his paper that the French people had no representation, that it was
in vain to attempt to oppose the government in the legislature: "_La
Chambre_," said Marrast, "_n'est qu' un mensonge_."[11]

Lamartine had thus, all at once, as if by a _coup-de-main_, become "a
popular greatness." He was the man of the people, without having
courted popularity--that stimulus (as he himself called it) to so many
noble acts and crimes, as the object of its caresses remains its
conscious master or its pandering slave. Lamartine grew rapidly in
public estimation, because he was a new man. All the great characters
of the Chamber, beginning with Casimir Perrier, had, in contact with
Louis Philippe, become either eclipsed or tarnished. Lamartine avoided
the court, but openly and frankly confessed that he belonged to no
party. He had boldly avowed his determination to oppose the government
of Louis Philippe, not merely this or that particular direction, which
it took in regard to its internal and external relations; but in its
whole general tendency. He was neither the friend nor the enemy of a
particular combination for the ministry, and had, during a short
period, given his support to Count Mole, not because he was satisfied
with his administration, but because he thought the opposition and its
objects less virtuous than the minister. In this independent position,
supported by an ample private fortune, (inherited, as we before
observed, by his maternal uncle, and the returns of his literary
activity,) Lamartine became an important element of parliamentary
combination, from the weight of his _personal_ influence, while at the
same time his "utopies," as they were termed by the tactitioners of
Alphonse Thiers, gave but little umbrage to the a