Various

“ To those far away, who know not the strange compound that forms the character of the French, the mere change of one flag for another may appear a matter of but little moment: but in truth it was one of almost inestimable importance, for the destiny of the country depended on it. And this Lamartine knew. He knew his people too—he knew how easily they are led away by the outward show, how completely their sentiments would be engaged in the outward symbols; and he reared the symbol of order against the banner of violence and blood; though he raised it aloft at the hazard of his life. ”

“ I have often thought since, in the greater experience of mankind which life has afforded me, that if, in early years, their destinies had been exchanged—if Roland had taken to literature, and my father had been forced into action—that, strange as it may seem, each would have had greater worldly success. For Roland's passion and energy would have given immediate and forcible effect to study; he might have been a historian or a poet. It is not study alone that produces a writer; it is intensity. In the mind, as in yonder chimney, to make the fire burn hot and quick, you must narrow the draught. ”

“ For what country but Great Britain has ever sent forth from its bosom such a colony as now forms the United States of America? What colony could ever look back upon a loftier lineage than America, when, comparing her own wide and thriving domains with many of the sinking empires of Europe, she remembers her British descent, and feels, in a thousand traces of blood and thoughts and habits and morals, her connexion with "the inviolate island of the sage and free." ”

“ And, like a silly boy, the first French republic rendered itself ridiculous by its extravagant absurdities. Like a stage-struck hero of the same age, it exaggerated and overacted its part: it fancied that it had but to put on the robe, and take the name, and strut and swagger; and that it would act the part, if not to the life, at least with wonderful effect. Unlike the silly boy, however, it went beyond the contemptible,—it became frantic, furious, bloodyminded—it became terrible: its hot young brains were turned, and dreamt bad dreams of cruelty and carnage. ”

“ We are patriots whilst the government of our country secures to us those possessions which our industry has earned for us, and which the written constitution has guaranteed us. All human experience shows this limit to the most exalted spirit of loyalty and patriotism. True it is we have not the power of Canada. We are as unable as we are unwilling to change our lot by force; but let England beware lest passive alienation of every sentiment that can attach us to her as a nation do not prove even more dangerous to her colonial power than any active spirit of disaffection could be. ”

“ His vanguard scaled the Julian Alps. All the roving warriors of Gaul and Germany, with a column of twenty thousand Saxons, instantly joined the Lombard banner. Italy, exhausted by a long continuance of disease and famine, and now accustomed to yield, had lain at the mercy of the first invader, and Alboin, with his sword in the sheath, marched through a fugitive population, and finished his bloodless triumph within the impregnable ramparts and patrician palaces of Verona. From the Trentine hills to the gates of Ravenna and Rome, all was the easy prize of Lombard victory. ”

“ He knew, too, that Fate was in his hands; he knew that in that seemingly senseless change of colours on a flag-staff lay the destiny of Paris; and he was prepared to fall a victim or to rise a hero. To the red flag popular fancy attached the idea of violence, war, revenge; it was the bloody pirate flag of propagandism by force of arms, by the terror of the scaffold. The tricolor flag, although it had waved over many a ruin, many a deed of horror, in the dreadful history of the past, had led on the nation to glory and military renown ”

“ The French Revolution of 1789, which startled every kingdom of Europe, shook Italy to its centre. The religion of Rome, while it fills the eye with ceremonies, and the ear with dogmas, makes but little impression on the heart, and none on the understanding. The boundless profligacy of Italian manners had long corrupted public life. The opera and the billiard-table were the only resources of an overgrown nobility, pauperised by their numbers, and despised for their pauperism. ”

“ If we have lost our colonies, what security have we that they will not refuse to admit the stream of pauperism which now flows into them from the parent state: that they will not treat them as the fraternising French republicans did the British artisans, and send them all home? And even if they should still consent to receive them, what security should we have for the maintenance of export of the £16,000,000 of British manufactures which now go out to our colonies, if, like the Americans, they levy their whole revenue to maintain their independent government upon imports from this country? ”

“ When it is placed upon his head, all his very self seems changed—he dreams but of violence, he raves but of blood: it seems like a talisman that, once it touches his skull, disturbs his intellects, heats his brains, causes his mouth to open to vomit forth destruction and death to all his fancied enemies: it is the cap of the fairy-tale that renders not invisible but brings into reality and action all that is reckless, cruel, arbitrary, hateful in his nature. ”

“ Proof, sir, is a handcuff—belief is a wing! Want proof as to an ancestor in the reign of King Richard! Sir, you cannot even prove to the satisfaction of a logician that you are the son of your own father. Sir, a religious man does not want to reason about his religion—religion is not mathematics. Religion is to be felt, not proved. There are a great many things in the religion of a good man which are not in the catechism. Proof!" continued my uncle, growing violent—"Proof, sir, is a low, vulgar, levelling, rascally Jacobin—Belief is a loyal, generous, chivalrous gentleman! ”

“ Every kingdom, princedom, duchy, and village has successively rebelled, and proclaimed a constitution; and before that constitution was a month old, has forgotten what it was. A flying duke, a plundered palace, a barricade, and a national guard, are all that the philosopher can detect, or the historian has to record, in the Revolution of Italy. How could it be otherwise? Can the man who bows down to an image, and listens to the fictions of a priest, exercise a rational understanding upon any other subject? ”

“ Italy has two evils, either of which would be enough to break down the most vigorous nation—if a vigorous nation would not have broken down both, ages ago. These two are the nobles and the priesthood—both ruinously numberless, both contemptibly idle, and both interested in resisting every useful change, which might shake their supremacy. Every period of Italian convulsion has left a class of men calling themselves nobles, and perpetuating the title to their sons. ”

“ The extinction of the throne, the flight of a dynasty, the sovereignty of the mob, and the universal frenzy of a nation, were bold sports, of which Italian souls knew nothing. But their effect was soon perilously felt; the populace of Milan determined to rival the populace of Paris—had an emeute of their own, built barricades, fought the Austrian garrison, and made themselves masters of the capital of Lombardy.
But the Italian is essentially a dramatist without the power of tragedy; he turns by nature to farce, and in his boldest affairs does nothing without burlesque. ”

“ The crowded seats of our manufactures and commerce—Liverpool and Manchester, Nottingham and Stockport—teem with the annual increment of creatures, who exclaim, 'Give us work and bread.' How shall we meet this cry? Shall we tell them that work is an affair of demand; that demand depends upon competition; that competition is an effect of population; that population outruns subsistence; that they are too many; in a word, that they have no right to exist? They would be bold men—that would be a bold government, which should hold such language as this. ”

“ The vine and the olive thrive on the sunny slopes which ascend from this plain to the ridges of the Alps, and a woody zone of never-failing beauty lies between the desolation of the mountain and the fertility of the plain. The produce of this region, which most intimately combines its interests with those of the great European marts, is silk. Italy now settles the market of silk over all Europe. Since the beginning of the present century, it has grown into an annual produce of the value of ten millions sterling! ”

“ Since the courageous action of Lamartine gave a first stamp to the character of the revolution, by putting down a dangerous sentiment in its bloody symbol, the violent party has in vain again endeavoured, as yet, to assume its lost supremacy. The horizon is dark with its menace, it is true, and its thunder growls, its lightnings flash, from time to time: the storm may be dispersed, or it may break forth, and then pass away. ”

“ Does a declaimer in a street crowd displease the multitude?—it cries again, "des lampions!" The words, then, have become a popular demonstrative cry; and who can tell how much in the future this habit may efface the hideous cry of "à la lanterne?"—how much the cry for light may cause the people to forget the cry for the darkness of death upon the lamp-post—how much, in truth, popular sentiment may be hereafter influenced by a trait of popular habit so slight, so frivolous, so ridiculous, and yet, perhaps, so important in its results. ”

“ The Grecian and the Roman symbols, therefore, were symbols to be avoided and repulsed. They remind of the past; they prepare people's minds for its return; they bring with them visions of blood. In the very heart's core of the people, with the Grecian allegories, and the Spartan virtues, and the fasces, are intimately connected comités de salut public, and denunciations unto death, and the guillotine. Away with them then! refer not to them again! repel them, second French republic, from your fêtes, and your public ceremonies, and your coins! ”

“ MY UNCLE ROLAND'S DISCOURSE UPON HONOUR.
"Gentlemen," began the Captain, at the distinct appeal thus made to him—"Gentlemen, God made the earth, but man made the garden. God made man, but man re-creates himself."
"True, by knowledge," said my father.
"By industry," said Uncle Jack.
"By the physical condition of his body," said Mr Squills. "He could not have made himself other than he was at first in the woods and wilds if he had fins like a fish, or could only chatter gibberish like a monkey. Hands and a tongue, sir; these are the instruments of progress." ”

“ We impute all their waste of those gifts to the fiction which they call their religion. We lament over the hopelessness of Italian restoration while the nation sees the melting of St Januarius's blood as a work of heaven; expects the remission of sins from looking at the napkin of St Veronica; bows down to an image of the Virgin as the worker of miracles, and as an object of divine worship. While this lasts, the mind of Italy must remain in the darkness of that of its fathers, it may have wars, but it will have no advance in liberty; it may have revolutions, but it will have no national vigour ”

“ The literature of modern Italy seldom rises into that region of publicity which carries a work beyond seas and mountains. She has not yet attained the great art of common sense—the only art which furnishes the works of man with wings. Her poetry is local and trifling: her prose is loose, feeble, and rambling. Her best writers seem to the European eye what the wanderers through Soirees and Conversaziones are to the well-informed ear,—men of words living on borrowed notions, and, after the first half-dozen sentences, intolerably tiresome. ”

“ There is an obvious insufficiency of food, of employment, and of investment in the country, while land languishes for lack of tillage; and when the plain remedy for these great deficiencies is pressed, there arises the ghost of long-past folly, waving its parchment before the legislature, and so the living are starved, in strict accordance not with the meaning but with the mistake of the dead. Free-trade is proclaimed to be the rule of our political practice by the same men who enact and maintain laws to fetter and reduce the circulation of the country, which is the life of its trade. ”

“ It is no doubt true that a large proportion of the persons who have suffered under the system introduced into our colonies, have been the very commercial and manufacturing class who have imposed it upon government. The manufacturing operatives joined the shopkeepers in the cry for free-trade,—and where has it left numbers of them?—in the workhouse and the Gazette. But that is no uncommon thing in human affairs; perhaps the greatest evils which befall both nations and individuals are those which they bring upon themselves by their own folly or grasping disposition. ”

“ They are subject to no discipline; the principle on which they proceed is the negation of all authority. They are preceded by the destruction of all those barriers which experience had erected, and found necessary to restrain vice's baneful influence. If they bear any resemblance to war, it is to the universal burst of passion which follows the storming of a fortress or sack of a city. The murder, rape, and conflagration which then invariably ensue, are but faint images of the wide-spread ruin which never fails to follow even the least bloody successful revolution. ”