Who, standing on the shore, has not seen, as the gale freshened into storm and swelled into the hurricane, the waves of the clear green sea gradually lose their brightness, until raking up from the lowest depths, convulsed with the mighty strife of the elements, the very obscene dregs and refuse of all matter terreous, or instinct of life, the mounting billows become one thick and unsightly mass of turbid waters, chafing with all the foam and froth of the unclean scourings of the deep, rioting in the ascendant? As in the world physical, so is it with the order of nature in the world moral and political. As the social horizon becomes troubled, as reform careers on to revolution, the empire of mind is overwhelmed--the brute matter and fiercer spirits of the masses ascend, and ride the tempest political more triumphantly as incipient confusion thickens into confirmed chaos. The bad eminence popularly of men so devoid of all principle and integrity, so strangely uncouth and assorted, as the Daniel O'Connells, the John M'Hales, and the Feargus O'Connors; of men so unlearned in all principle, political and economical--so wanting, moreover, in the presence of the higher order of moral sentiments, as the Cobdens, the Brights, the Rory O'Mores, the Aucklands, and Sydney (he of the League) Smiths, is among the worst symptoms of the diseased times upon which the country has fallen. It recalls forcibly to mind, it reproduces the opening scenes and the progress, the men and the machinery, of the first French Revolution, the precursor of so many more, upon the last act of the last fashioned melodrama of which the curtain has not yet probably descended. How then the meaner spirits succeeded in the whirlwind of change, to the mightier minds which first conjured and hoped to control it; how the Mirabeaux, the Lally Tollendals, the Mouniers of the Assembly, were replaced and popularly displaced by the sophists and intriguers of the Gironde and the Constituent; how, in the Convention and the hall of the Jacobins, the coarser men of the whole movement--the Dantons, the Robespierres, the Marats, the facetious as ferocious Bareres, the stupid Anacharsis Clootzes--trampled under foot, or finished with the guillotine, the _phraseurs_ and _meneurs_ of the Gironde, your orators of set speech, glittering abstractions, and hair-splitting definitions; the Brissots, Vergniauds, Condorcets, and Rolands, who could degrade, dethrone, and condemn a king to perpetual imprisonment, but were just too dainty of conscience to go the whole hog of murder. As history, like an old almanack, does but repeat itself within a given cycle of years, so the same round, cast, and change of characters and characteristics, with all the other paraphernalia of the great drama, Reform and Revolution, as performed in France, have been, and are in due order enacting and exhibiting in this country. We have already seen, however, the Greys,