Amongst the sentiments that have been much cultivated in the past there is one which is less and less cultivated in modern France, the sentiment of reverence. The difficulty is to find objects for reverence that can effectually withstand the desecrating light of modern criticism. Good Catholics have still an object of veneration in the Pope and, in minor degrees, in the bishops and other priests; but since the death of the Count de Chambord there is not a single political personage left who excites veneration even in the mind of a royalist. The republicans venerate nobody, not even poor ex-president Grévy. Victor Hugo was, no doubt, regarded with veneration, but he has left no successor. Father Ingres was also really venerated by a certain sect of younger artists in his time. Chevreul, the centenarian, is respected for his achievements and for his hundred years. In this way two or three individuals in a century may excite some veneration, but the sentiment, outside of the Church, lacks continuity of culture. The true royalist sentiment is dead in France, the religious sentiment survives only in a part of the population, and is failing even there, whilst the French have not the vulgar veneration for titles which would at least exercise the faculty, though on low objects. Neither do the posts occupied by high officials under the Republic excite veneration in anybody. The royalists unanimously despise them, the republicans generally want to dismiss the present occupants and put other men in their places. In family life there is much affection certainly, and no doubt there is some respect, but there is no veneration. “Your sons,” I said to an intelligent Frenchman, “treat you with much freedom. They do not seem to be in the least impressed by any idea of the paternal dignity.”--“How can we expect them,” he answered, “to be deferential and reverential to us when we, on our part, have set them, on every possible occasion, the example of a want of reverence towards the beliefs and the institutions of our fathers? They have heard nothing but criticism from our lips, they have grown up in an age of criticism, when there is nothing for the faculty of veneration to cling to.” In a word, veneration had never been exercised or developed in their minds. [Sidenote: Veneration in England. The Bible and the Throne. Houses of Parliament.] [Sidenote: Critical Writing.] [Sidenote: Veneration in Poetry.] [Sidenote: Effects of the want of Veneration in the Common People.] [Sidenote: Loss of Faith in the Classics.]