beheaded for--in effigy! For
indeed hardly since the Arabian Prophet lay dead to Ali's admiration,
was there seen such a Love-hero, with the strength of thirty men. In
War, again, he has helped to conquer Corsica; fought duels, irregular
brawls; horsewhipped calumnious barons. In Literature, he has written on
Despotism, on Lettres-de-Cachet; Erotics Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities,
Profanities; Books on the Prussian Monarchy, on Cagliostro, on Calonne,
on the Water Companies of Paris:--each book comparable, we will say,
to a bituminous alarum-fire; huge, smoky, sudden! The firepan, the
kindling, the bitumen were his own; but the lumber, of rags, old wood
and nameless combustible rubbish (for all is fuel to him), was gathered
from huckster, and ass-panniers, of every description under heaven.
Whereby, indeed, hucksters enough have been heard to exclaim: Out upon
it, the fire is mine!

Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for
borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man he can make his; the
man himself he can make his. "All reflex and echo (tout de reflet et de
reverbere)!" snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not. Crabbed old
Friend of Men! it is his sociality, his aggregative nature; and will
now be the quality of all for him. In that forty-years 'struggle against
despotism,' he has gained the glorious faculty of self-help, and yet
not lost the glorious natural gift of fellowship, of being helped. Rare
union! This man can live self-sufficing--yet lives also in the life of
other men; can make men love him, work with him: a born king of men!

But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he has "made
away with (hume, swallowed) all Formulas;"--a fact which, if we meditate
it, will in these days mean much. This is no man of system, then; he is
only a man of instincts and insights. A man nevertheless who will glare
fiercely on any object; and see through it, and conquer it: for he
has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with
logic-spectacles; but with an eye! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral
Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without a strong living Soul
in him, and Sincerity there: a Reality, not an Artificiality, not a
Sham! And so he, having struggled 'forty years against despotism,'
and 'made away with all formulas,' shall now become the spokesman of
a Nation bent to do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle
of France also to cast off