When Paris was, for many days and almost weeks, given up to the fanciful caprices of a mob, that pocketed the public money and repaid it by the fantastic diversions of its idleness--when it streamed about the streets with banners, and flags, and ribbons and music, carrying about bedizened may-poles, and grubbing holes on every _Place_, before every public monument, in every street, in almost every hole and corner of all Paris, in which to plant them, it was not the yelling of the crowd, it was not the incessant firing of guns and letting off of crackers by night as well as day, it was not the compulsory subscription _à domicile_ for the expenses of a mob's fête of every moment, it was not the threatening cry of "_des lampions_--illuminate in our honour, or we break your windows," it was not the tumult, the constraint, the menace that cast a vague terror over the public mind;--it was the feeling that scenes of a terrible memory were about to be acted over again;--it was the knowledge that such had been in gone-by times the gay, green, laughing prologue to a hideous tragedy;--it was the consciousness that the so-called trees of liberty were symbols in the minds of a mob of an era of license, and riot, and carnage--that the pike, and the sabre, and the axe were the accessories of the gay picture, although still in the dimness of a dark background--that the leaves those bare stems might bear were to sprout, perchance, with spots of blood upon their young verdure. Men looked askance: the symbol of a people's drunkenness in power was waving before their windows: how far, they asked, was the sentiment that thus darkly arose in their minds, predominant also in the minds of the mob, when it raised that symbol? It was in vain they reasoned, that the France of the nineteenth century was no longer the France of the eighteenth--that the bloodthirstiness and the reckless cruelty had passed away from the character of a people advanced in civilisation--that the present had no analogy with the past: it was in vain they sought a reassurance in the fact that the pale priest was dragged from the church to bestow his blessing, with all the pomp of Catholic ecclesiastical ceremony, upon the symbol, and give a seemingly religious sanction to a people's fantastic rite of patriotism--that there was consequently a feeling of holiness in the people's mind in the accomplishment of that ceremony. On the contrary, the very mockery alarmed: the very compulsory attendance of the clergy seemed to prove that there was rather a desire in the mob to show its power than to attach a sanctity, which it needed not otherwise in common life, to the deeds it did: a terror, vague, ill-defined, unreasoned, but none the less real, floated over every mind. The symbol flaunted abroad the sentiment of the past. It was not until the authorities too late issued decrees, to prohibit the further practice of these fantastic allegorical popular manifestations, that confidence, or rather