PART THE SECOND. XLVII.-In meditating on these momentous events we must project ourselves to a higher level than that which contented the celebrated Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution of his time. He professed to have no general apostolical mission, to be the citizen of a particular State, and to be bound up in a considerable degree by its public will. The times have since changed; public men now feel and acknowledge a special call; every country is so bound up in one and the same system, that individuals feel themselves rather to be European than national, and to recognise it as a duty no less than as a right to regard not only the interests of their own birth-place, but those of the world at large. To Burke, however, even that first revolution appeared, as he confesses in so many terms, a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe-perhaps of more than Europe." "All things taken together," he added, "the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.” But the present Revolution of 1848 is still more wonderful-besides, being not alone the Revolution of France, but of Europe. It is true, that in this, as in that of 1789, "the most surprising things have been brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and appa 66 rently by the most contemptible means." In the scene enacted, there has been a strange mixture of tragedy and comedy: - but the sublime part of the business has not been exclusively confided to royal and official actors. Up to a late moment, as we have seen, the sense of the ridiculous remained with M. Guizot: but its object was the Dynastic Party, not the Republican body outside the Senate, or their representatives within. His thoughts never reached to them—the visionaries, the impracticable idealists. Nevertheless, let justice be done to M. Guizot; though mainly by his own act, the parliamentary party opposed to him was in the position of imbecility which he ascribed to them. The time was past for them to have any influence-for a Ministry formed by them to be possible. After the abdication of the King, the Dynastic Opposition in the Chamber, says an Eye-witness, " looked more anxious than even the Conservatives, so recently driven from power. The position they had struggled for during seven years, was now failing them in one hour." The question between M. Guizot, one historian, and M. Thiers, another historian, had become of little moment. A cycle had closed, and a new era was opening. The new time required a creator, not a recorder. There was something to be done, not told. In a word, an inspired Lamartine was required; less than the poetic genius was inadequate to the exigency of the occasion. XLVIII.-M. Guizot, notwithstanding his large intelligence, with the poetic, wanted the prophetic faculty. He lived in the conventions of the past and present-he had no taste nor instinct for that "vision of the future" in which M. Lamartine delighted to indulge. M. Guizot, however, was scarcely in a position to recognise Burke's theory of Kingship. The monarch he supported, though |