lorious army! pure swords! holy
bayonets!" upon which the eyes of the world are fixed, and which will
eventually save that world by--cutting the throats of all the enemies of
France.

M. MICHELET has obtained some celebrity in Europe: amongst the learned
and the reading public by his histories; amongst the masses by that
remarkable work styled _Priests, Women, and Families_, which met with
many readers and elaborate notices in this country, and was reviewed in
the pages of this Magazine as recently as August last. We paid our
tribute of respect to an effort which, whatever might be its faults--and
serious faults it had--was distinguished by a commanding eloquence, a
manly energy, and an uncompromising zeal worthy of the cause which the
historian had undertaken; viz., the restoration of _woman_ to her
spiritual and social rights--rights invaded by the stranger, trampled
upon by priestcraft. We did not stay to inquire into the motives by
which the indignant professor of the College of France had been
actuated. It may have been, that, to avenge a slight inflicted upon him
by the Jesuits, the learned teacher aimed a blow at the entire Roman
Catholic Church; that having repudiated the sentiments of his early
life--sentiments which attached him affectionately to the religion,
poetry, and traditions of the middle ages--he burned with the new fire
of a convert or an apostate, and sought to establish the sincerity of
his conversion by deadly home-thrusts at the party he had forsaken. It
was sufficient for us that a scholar and a Frenchman had manfully
advanced to the rescue of his fellow-countrywomen; that he had detected
the errors that lay at the heart of their social condition; that he had
noted the hindrances that affected domestic purity and peace; and
bravely undertook, if possible, to remove, at all events to expose and
brand them.

There is great peril attending the career of any man who acquires the
reputation of a reformer of abuses. It is easier to acquire that
reputation than to sustain it. It is well when the necessity gives birth
to the reformer; but it is ill when the reformer, in order to live, is
forced to create the necessity. There was ease and grace, simplicity and
truthfulness, honesty and ardour, in that defence of woman, to which the
champion was urged by the conviction that he entertained of her wrongs.
Few of these qualities remain in the work now before us--a work
suggested by any thing rather than th