And there one could wish to stop with this apotheosis of liberty and
order read with the generous enthusiasm of a boy; but as the reader
knows, it was but the first act of the piece. The letters, vivid as they
are, written as they were by a hand trembling with fear and excitement,
yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone, to the profound effect
produced. At the sound of these songs and shot of cannon, the boy's mind
awoke. He dated his own appreciation of the art of acting from the day
when he saw and heard Rachel recite the "Marseillaise" at the Francais,
the tricolor in her arms. What is still more strange, he had been up to
then invincibly indifferent to music, insomuch that he could not
distinguish "God save the Queen" from "Bonnie Dundee"; and now, to the
chanting of the mob, he amazed his family by learning and singing
"Mourir pour la Patrie." But the letters, though they prepare the mind
for no such revolution in the boy's tastes and feelings, are yet full of
entertaining traits. Let the reader note Fleeming's eagerness to
influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further
history displayed; his unconscious indifference to his father and
devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and
omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive "person resident on
the spot," who was so happy as to escape insult; and the strange picture
of the household--father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna--all day
in the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed
off alone to school in a distant quarter on the very morrow of the
massacre.

They had all the gift of enjoying life's texture as it comes: they were
all born optimists. The name of liberty was honoured in that family, its
spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of the foreign
friends of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men distinguished on the
Liberal side. Like Wordsworth, they beheld

"France standing on the top of golden hours
And human nature seeming born again."

At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their element in
such a decent and whiggish convulsion, spectacular in its course,
moderate in its purpose. For them,

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven."

And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like Wordsworth) they
should have so specially disliked the consequence.

It came upon them by surprise. Liberal frien