t seems to me, justice in history
has hardly yet been done. "Lamartine was not republican enough
for republicans; he lost at last his prestige among the people,
and from personal causes the full sympathy of his friends; and his
star sank before the rising sun of Louis Napoleon." Mrs. Oliphant
also says of him,--

"In the midst of his manifold literary labors there happened to
Lamartine such a chance as befalls few poets. He had it in his
power, once in his life, to do something greater than the greatest
lyric, more noble than any verse. At the crisis of the Revolution
of 1848, chance (to use the word without irreverence) thrust him,
and no other, into the place of master, and held him for one supreme
moment alone between France and anarchy,--between, we might almost
say, the world and another terrible revolution. And then the
sentimentalist proved himself a man. He confronted raving Paris,
and subdued it. The old noble French blood in his veins rose to
the greatness of the crisis. With a pardonable thrill of pride
in a position so strange to a writer and a man of thought, into
which, without any action of his own, he found himself forced,
he describes how he faced the tumultuous mob of Paris for seventy
hours almost without repose, without sleep, without food, when
there was no other man in France bold enough or wise enough to
take that supreme part, and guide that most aimless of revolutions
to a peaceful conclusion,--for the moment, at least. It was not
Lamartine's fault that the Empire came after him. Long before the
Empire came, he had fallen from his momentary elevation, and lost
all influence with his country. But his downfall cannot efface the
fact that he did actually reign, and reign beneficently, subduing
and controlling the excited nation, saving men's lives and the
balance of society."

The seventy hours at the Hotel-de-Ville to which Mrs. Oliphant
alludes were passed by Lamartine in making orations, in sending
off proclamations to the departments, in endeavoring to calm the
excited multitude and to secure the triumph of the Republic without
the effusion of blood. The revolution _he_ conducted was, if I may
say so, the only _respectable_ revolution France has ever known.
Nobody expected it, nobody was prepared for it, nobody worked for
it; but the whole country acquiesced in it, and men of all parties,
seeing that it was an accomplished fact, gave in their adhesion
to the Second Republic.

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