When Lamartine, in the face of a mob still excited with battle and bloodshed, still drunken with the intoxication of victory, demanding, of those whom the chances of a destiny-fraught hour had placed at their head in the perilous post of command, they scarce knew what, and yet ready to recommence destruction and death were it not granted--when Lamartine tore aside the blood-red banner of terror, that had been seized on as the symbol of the newly proclaimed French Republic, and lifted aloft the tricolor flag as the true standard of the Republic of peace and order which he hoped to found, he did not only an act of personal courage--one to be mentioned among the great traits of heroism in the annals of history--but he consummated a deed upon which the destiny of France, perhaps of the whole world, for the moment depended. To those far away, who know not the strange compound that forms the character of the French, the mere change of one flag for another may appear a matter of but little moment: but in truth it was one of almost inestimable importance, for the destiny of the country depended on it. And this Lamartine knew. He knew his people too--he knew how easily they are led away by the outward show, how completely their sentiments would be engaged in the outward symbols; and he reared the symbol of order against the banner of violence and blood; though he raised it aloft at the hazard of his life. At that moment the poet-statesman stood forth a man ready to die for his convictions: at that moment, guns, pikes, swords, daggers, every instrument of death was directed at his head by a furious mob, screaming for that ideal, the Republic, from which it had been taught by demagogues to expect some vague, supernatural, at least wholly visionary good, as if it were a talisman to raise up a golden age by the mere power of its name; a mob, senseless, enraged, and deaf to reason, flushed with the acquisition of sudden and sovereign power, and yet goaded by the idea that treachery was at hand to snatch it from their grasp. In the face of such an assemblage, before the historical old building of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris,--upon those steps on which so many scenes of history had already passed, and none, perhaps, more important in its results than this,--he stood forth, pale, but erect and resolute: a single word from the crowd, the cry "he is a traitor! he deceives us!" might have been the signal for his massacre: a gesture might have done the deed: the wag of one nerve of a finger on the lock of the gun might have levelled him, and with him France, at once: and he knew it. He knew, too, that FATE was in his hands; he knew that in that seemingly senseless change of colours on a flag-staff lay the destiny of Paris; and he was prepared to fall a victim or to rise a hero. To the red flag popular fancy attached the idea of violence, war, revenge; it was the bloody pirate flag of propagandism by force of arms, by the terror of the scaffold. The