forgetfulness of the uneasiness that such demonstrations of popular sentiment had instinctively conveyed, began slowly to return to the public mind. The trees of liberty stand, it is true, and flourish, and put forth leaves, amid the flags, and ribbons, and withered wreaths, and tricolor streamers, which flaunt, and twine, and flutter around them; but it was not the fact--it was the sentiment that caused alarm. As a symbol, however, they remain: and may yet re-evoke the sentiment that for a while has been forgotten, and still act a part in the future troubled chronicles of the streets of Paris. There is one object, above all, that is accepted and recognised as a symbol of the past--as a symbol, in fact, of terror and violence: it is the Phrygian cap of liberty. So dear does this symbol appear to the would-be Roman heart of the violent republican, that he seems not to be able to perform any act, not only of his political but of his social existence, without its evidence before his eyes. This graceless head-dress--graceless, inasmuch as, instead of being allowed to fall into a natural curve, and rounded knob above, as is even the fashion to the present day of its offspring the _lazzaroni_ cap of Naples, it is cut into a stiff, constrained, and badly imitated form of natural folds--this graceless head-dress seems the idol of his day-dreams, the bodily presence of the deity he falls down and worships, the ecstatical and rhapsodical apparition of the visions of his sleep. It figures in his allegorical pictures, surrounded by the rays of a sun of glory, like an emblem of the Godhead or the Trinity: it must be placed upon its sanctuary in his room like the crucifix in the oratory of the Catholic: it must be stamped upon his coins like the Mother of God upon the kreutzer pieces of Catholic Austria. When it is placed upon his head, all his very self seems changed--he dreams but of violence, he raves but of blood: it seems like a talisman that, once it touches his skull, disturbs his intellects, heats his brains, causes his mouth to open to vomit forth destruction and death to all his fancied enemies: it is the cap of the fairy-tale that renders not invisible but brings into reality and action all that is reckless, cruel, arbitrary, hateful in his nature. He may be in private life the mild and gentle man, full of suavity and affection, the loving husband, and the kind father; let him don the Phrygian cap of liberty, and he thinks it necessary to put on the face and wear the heart of a demon--he is tyrannical, brutal, implacable; all that lends not a hand to his sweeping designs, in furtherance of his _exalted_ opinions, must be mown down, or torn up like the tares amidst the wheat, and flung into the pit of destruction; and, in his mind, the good grain is rare; but, when the tares are rooted out of the land, the good grain will flourish and multiply, he thinks: and the raising of this symbol,