northern sky; and happy would the results of all this nonsense have been, had the republic only caught a cold, or a sore throat, or a toothach: unfortunately, it caught a fever, a sore soul, and a heartach. Those were the days when fasces were carried abroad in public fêtes, as emblems of liberty,--fasces! those true emblems of constraint and tyranny--of constraint by the stick, of tyranny by the axe,--fasces! such as lictors carried before Nero; and the fasces were stamped upon the coins of the republic, surmounted by a cap of liberty! Those were the days when Greece and Rome were _soi-disant_ models, greedily swallowed, ill digested, and producing nausea, loathing, and sickness. The Grecian and the Roman symbols, therefore, were symbols to be avoided and repulsed. They remind of the past; they prepare people's minds for its return; they bring with them visions of blood. In the very heart's core of the people, with the Grecian allegories, and the Spartan virtues, and the fasces, are intimately connected _comités de salut public_, and denunciations unto death, and the guillotine. Away with them then! refer not to them again! repel them, second French republic, from your fêtes, and your public ceremonies, and your coins! They are all so many prickly whips to drive men's minds back to the bloody past, and urge them again along the self-same blood-stained road. Surely, too, the day of such worn-out theatrical humbug is past: the world has grown more civilised and more sensible: the age of allegorical absurdities is gone by. True! the world has also lost much of its poetry and romance; and there may be those who regret it, and would be foolish still; but all this _Greco-Franco_ republican romance and poetry, borrowed of the ancients, is now sadly out of place. What do I say?--is to be shunned as the plague-fraught garment from the East, that, when thrown upon your shoulders, may extend a fatal disease far and wide among the land, that may become another robe of Nessus to burn and consume you to the bones; and when once thrown on, not to be torn away again without tearing with it the healthful flesh, and the very blood of life. And yet there are those who would seem determined ever to refer back to the past days, ever to spur along the old road, and who appear to dream that they can never produce the effect they want, but by spreading the poisoned garment over the back of France. There has been a reckless Minister of the Interior, who, hand-in-hand with a strong-minded but ill-judging woman, full of strange subversive fancies, which she proclaims with a masculine voice, and in a nominal masculine garb, seems to forget the importance of such symbols over the easily exciteable imaginations of the French, or perhaps even--may God forgive him, if so it be!--adopts the symbols of the past, in order to prepare the way for its return, and for the return to his own hands of the tyranny of democratic despotism. It is he who has