ould have been more impeded
by the government he wanted to make? And then the secular Comtists, Mr.
Harrison and Mr. Beesly, who want to 'Frenchify the English
institutions'--that is, to introduce here an imitation of the
Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat--who can
doubt that if both these clever writers had been real Frenchmen they
would have been irascible anti-Bonapartists, and have been sent to
Cayenne long ere now? The wish of these writers is very natural. They
want to 'organise society,' to erect a despot who will do what they
like, and work out their ideas; but any despot will do what he himself
likes, and will root out new ideas ninety-nine times for once that he
introduces them. Again, side by side with these Comtists, and warring
with them--at least with one of them--is Mr. Arnold, whose poems we
know by heart, and who has, as much as any living Englishman, the
genuine literary impulse; and yet even he wants to put a yoke upon
us--and, worse than a political yoke, an academic yoke, a yoke upon our
minds and our styles. He, too, asks us to imitate France; and what else
can we say than what the two most thorough Frenchmen of the last age
did say?--'Dans les corps a talent, nulle distinction ne fait ombrage,
si ce n'est pas celle du talent. Un due et pair honore l'Academie
Francaise, qui ne veut point de Boileau, refuse la Bruyere, fait
attendre Voltaire, mais recoit tout d'abord Chapelain et Conrart. De
meme nous voyons a l'Academie Grecque le vicomte invite, Corai
repousse, lorsque Jormard y entre comme dans un moulin.' Thus speaks
Paul-Louis Courier in his own brief inimitable prose. And a still
greater writer--a real Frenchman, if ever there was one, and (what many
critics would have denied to be possible) a great poet by reason of his
most French characteristics--Beranger, tells us in verse:--

Je croyais voir le president
Fairs bailler--en repondant
Que l'on vient de perdre un grand homme;
Que moi je le vaux, Dieu sait comme.
Mais ce president sans facon[6]
Ne perore ici qu'en chanson:
Toujours trop tot sa harangue est finie.
Non, non, ce n'est point comme a l'Academia;
Ce n'est point comme a l'Academie.

Admis enfin, aurai-jo alors,
Pour tout esprit, l'esprit de corps?
Il rend le bon sens, quoi qu'on dise,
Solidaire de la sottise;
Mais, dans votes societe,
L'esprit de corps, c'est la gaite.
Ce