by the whole breadth of France, who are nevertheless to meet.  Ever wider burns the flame of Federation; ever wider and also brighter.  Thus the Brittany and Anjou brethren mention a Fraternity of all true Frenchmen; and go the length of invoking ‘perdition and death’ on any renegade:  moreover, if in their National-Assembly harangue, they glance plaintively at the marc d’argent which makes so many citizens passive, they, over in the Mother-Society, ask, being henceforth themselves ’neither Bretons nor Angevins but French,’ Why all France has not one Federation, and universal Oath of Brotherhood, once for all? (Reports, &c. (in Hist.  Parl. ix. 122-147).) A most pertinent suggestion; dating from the end of March.  Which pertinent suggestion the whole Patriot world cannot but catch, and reverberate and agitate till it become loud;—­which, in that case, the Townhall Municipals had better take up, and meditate.

Some universal Federation seems inevitable:  the Where is given; clearly Paris:  only the When, the How?  These also productive Time will give; is already giving.  For always as the Federative work goes on, it perfects itself, and Patriot genius adds contribution after contribution.  Thus, at Lyons, in the end of the May month, we behold as many as fifty, or some say sixty thousand, met to federate; and a multitude looking on, which it would be difficult to number.  From dawn to dusk!  For our Lyons Guardsmen took rank, at five in the bright dewy morning; came pouring in, bright-gleaming, to the Quai de Rhone, to march thence to the Federation-field; amid wavings of hats and lady-handkerchiefs; glad shoutings of some two hundred thousand Patriot voices and hearts; the beautiful and brave!  Among whom, courting no notice, and yet the notablest of all, what queenlike Figure is this; with her escort of house-friends and Champagneux the Patriot Editor; come abroad with the earliest?  Radiant with enthusiasm are those dark eyes, is that strong Minerva-face, looking dignity and earnest joy; joyfullest she where all are joyful.  It is Roland de la Platriere’s Wife! (Madame Roland, Memoires, i. (Discours Preliminaire, p. 23).) Strict elderly Roland, King’s Inspector of Manufactures here; and now likewise, by popular choice, the strictest of our new Lyons Municipals:  a man who has gained much, if worth and faculty be gain; but above all things, has gained to wife Phlipon the Paris Engraver’s daughter.  Reader, mark that queenlike burgher-woman:  beautiful, Amazonian-graceful to the eye; more so to the mind.  Unconscious of her worth (as all worth is), of her greatness, of her crystal clearness; genuine, the creature of Sincerity and Nature, in an age of Artificiality, Pollution and Cant; there, in her still completeness, in her still invincibility, she, if thou knew it, is the noblest of all living Frenchwomen,—­and will be seen, one day.  O blessed rather while unseen, even of herself!  For the present she gazes, nothing doubting, into this grand theatricality; and thinks her young dreams are to be fulfilled.