And so, by a very roundabout process, we reach the heart of the mystery. M. Michelet loves fighting--remembers Waterloo--is game--is eager for another round, and in his heart believes one Frenchman to be equal to at least half a dozen Englishmen. He burns for one more trial of strength--a last decisive tussle; and he writes a philosophical work to prove the physical bout essential to the dignity, the grandeur, and the redemption of his country. Every time, we repeat the words, that he looks upon a bayonet, his heart bounds within him, and his only hope, teacher and professor of the College of France though he be, rests in trumpets, drums, swords, the epaulette, the sabredash, and the tricolor. We have surely wasted ink enough upon this theme. In common with ourselves, the reader will regard with due commiseration, a manifestation of wicked folly, which will do no harm only because it comes in an age not ripe for bloodshed, or happily too humanized for unprovoked, gratuitous warfare; and because the French people themselves, under a politic king and a peace-seeking ministry, have learned a little to regard the blessings of undisturbed domestic quietness. We quit the main subject of M. Michelet's book, to draw attention to a few insulated passages worthy of the better days of the author, and certainly out of place in the present volume. It were not possible for M. Michelet to write four hundred pages that should not, here and there, give evidence of his great genius--his general common sense, and his touching sympathy for the suffering and the oppressed. There are passages in the work under consideration that have universal interest, and claim universal attention; his appeals on behalf of children and women, the most neglected and oppressed of the community, let them be found where they may, in England or in France, in Europe or in Asia, are instinct with truthfulness and honest vigour; his vindication of the _mission_ of the child, philosophical and just, is beaming with the light that burns so steadily and clearly in the poems of our own Wordsworth, which have especial reference to the holy character of the "Father of the Man."