We purposely close our account of Lamartine's personal career with this splendid passage in his life. His subsequent conduct, it is well known, has ill accorded with this beginning. His popularity in Paris fell as rapidly as it had risen; and on occasion of the terrible revolt of June 1848, he retired from the government, with all his colleagues, from acknowledged inability to meet the crisis which had arisen. We have heard different accounts of the real causes of his mysterious alliance with his former opponent, and the head of the Red Republicans, M. Ledru Rollin, to which this fall was owing. Some of these stories are little to his credit. We forbear to mention them, lest we should unwittingly disseminate falsehood in regard to a man of undoubted genius and great acquirements. Perhaps, in some future "Confidences," he may be able to explain much which undoubtedly at present stands in need of explanation. We gladly leave this dubious subject, to give a place to his dramatic account of the dreadful conflict in June, in the streets of Paris, which is the more entitled to credit, as he was an eyewitness of several of its most terrible scenes:-- "Assemblages of eight or ten thousand persons were already formed on the Place of the Pantheon to attack the Luxembourg. M. Arago harangued them and persuaded them to disperse; but it was only to meet again in the quarters adjoining the Seine, in the Faubourg St Antoine, and on the Boulevards. At the sight of them the faubourgs turned out--the streets were filled--the _Ateliers Nationaux_ turned out their hordes--the populace, excited by some chief, began to raise barricades. These chiefs were, for the most part, brigadiers of the national workshops, the pillars of sedition and of the clubs, irritated at the disbanding of their corps, the wages of which, passing through their hands, had been applied, it is said, to paying the Revolution. From the barriers of Charenton, Fontainebleau, and Menilmontant, to the heart of Paris, the entire capital was in the hands of a few thousand men. The _rappel_ called to their standards 200,000 National Guards, ten times sufficient to overthrow those assemblages of the seditious, and to destroy their fortifications. But it must be said, to the disgrace of that day, and for the instruction of posterity, that the National Guard at that decisive moment _did not answer in a body to the appeal of the government_. Their tardiness, their disinclination, their inertness, left the streets in some quarters open to sedition. They looked on with calm eyes on the erection of thousands of barricades, which they had afterwards to reconquer with torrents of blood. Soon the government quitted the Luxembourg and took refuge in the National Assembly, where, at the headquarters of General Cavaignac, was established the supreme council of the nation.