sentiments were ambiguous in their eyes, if only by reason of his aristocratic relations. And now, when he actually added that the freedom of states had nothing at all to do with retrenchment of expenses, with greater security of property, with increased comfort of living, in short, with the promotion of material welfare, that all this was found often still more abundantly in monarchies, and that that for which one sacrificed property and life must of course be something higher than property or life;--when he further said, every man of culture and virtue lived under a republican form of government, notwithstanding his physical relations, just as prisoners in _democracies_ enjoyed nevertheless the rights of freedom;--and when he made himself, not so much for the Minister and the Upper House as for the English people, armor-bearer and _Contradictor_, because the principles of the first two had from time immemorial combated those of the latter and not yet determined them; because the complaint of to-day was as old as the (English) revolution; because the ground-plan of this last could be torn to pieces only in a formal counter-revolution; because all acts of injustice were committed _according_ to the _show_ of law, which was better than a justice _against_ the _show_ of law; and because the _nunnery-grating_ which had now been built around the freedom of the English press[35] was no worse than the Athenian prohibition of philosophizing, but better than the permission of the Roman emperors to make pasquils upon them,---- The English love long coats and speeches. As he began with "when," so must, in his as in my period, a "then" follow.... Then was there not a devil of them satisfied, and Cato the Elder said: "If he should deliver these principles in the Upper House, there would arise the greatest uproar on the subject, but from approbation, and every hearer would still cry, _Hear him!_" Victor said, with the modesty of a man of the world, he was as warm a republican and Old Briton as any of them, only he was incapable to-day of "proving from these principles that he resembled them;--perhaps at the next club!" "And that can be held," said the Court-Chaplain, "on my birthday, in a few weeks."--If we live to see it,--I and the reader,--it is to be hoped they will invite us, too, as old godfathers; the first time (on the sixth Dog-Post-Day) we were, as is well known, a part of the company.