as a Reformer, of the very Sicilians fighting divinely for
liberty behind barricades,--must have bitterly aggravated the
feeling of every Frenchman, as he looked around him, at home, on
a Louis-Philippism which had become the scorn of all the world.
"_Ichabod_; is the glory departing from us? Under the sun is
nothing baser, by all accounts and evidences, than the system of
repression and corruption, of shameless dishonesty and unbelief
in anything but human baseness, that we now live under. The
Italians, the very Pope, have become apostles of liberty, and
France is--what is France!"--We know what France suddenly became
in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy, we
can trace a considerable share in that event to the good simple
Pope with the New Testament in his hand. An outbreak, or at
least a radical change and even inversion of affairs hardly to be
achieved without an outbreak, everybody felt was inevitable in
France: but it had been universally expected that France would
as usual take the initiative in that matter; and had there been
no reforming Pope, no insurrectionary Sicily, France had
certainly not broken out then and so, but only afterwards and
otherwise. The French explosion, not anticipated by the
cunningest men there on the spot scrutinizing it, burst up
unlimited, complete, defying computation or control.

Close following which, as if by sympathetic subterranean
electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable;
and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous,
amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world
ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has
there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose
monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos.