hopeful grandfathers. We may well envy them their optimism of which this
anecdote of an amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an extreme
instance, but still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the
spontaneous testimony to that trust in the life of the earth, triumphant
at last in the felicity of her children. Moreover, the psychology of
individuals, even in the most extreme instances, reflects the general
effect of the fears and hopes of its time. Wept for joy! I should think
that now, after eighty years, the emotion would be of a sterner sort. One
could not imagine anybody shedding tears of joy at the sight of much life
in a street, unless, perhaps, he were an enthusiastic officer of a
general staff or a popular politician, with a career yet to make. And
hardly even that. In the case of the first tears would be
unprofessional, and a stern repression of all signs of joy at the
provision of so much food for powder more in accord with the rules of
prudence; the joy of the second would be checked before it found issue in
weeping by anxious doubts as to the soundness of these electors' views
upon the question of the hour, and the fear of missing the consensus of
their votes.

No! It seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now as much as
ever during the last hundred years, to go no further back. The end of
the eighteenth century was, too, a time of optimism and of dismal
mediocrity in which the French Revolution exploded like a bombshell. In
its lurid blaze the insufficiency of Europe, the inferiority of minds, of
military and administrative systems, stood exposed with pitiless
vividness. And there is but little courage in saying at this time of the
day that the glorified French Revolution itself, except for its
destructive force, was in essentials a mediocre phenomenon. The
parentage of that great social and political upheaval was intellectual,
the idea was elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its