So wags and wavers this unrestful World, day after day, month after month.  The Streets of Paris, and all Cities, roll daily their oscillatory flood of men; which flood does, nightly, disappear, and lie hidden horizontal in beds and trucklebeds; and awakes on the morrow to new perpendicularity and movement.  Men go their roads, foolish or wise;—­Engineer Goguelat to and fro, bearing Queen’s cipher.  A Madame de Stael is busy; cannot clutch her Narbonne from the Time-flood:  a Princess de Lamballe is busy; cannot help her Queen.  Barnave, seeing the Feuillants dispersed, and Coblentz so brisk, begs by way of final recompence to kiss her Majesty’s hand; augurs not well of her new course; and retires home to Grenoble, to wed an heiress there.  The Cafe Valois and Meot the Restaurateur’s hear daily gasconade; loud babble of Half-pay Royalists, with or without Poniards; remnants of Aristocrat saloons call the new Ministry Ministere-Sansculotte.  A Louvet, of the Romance Faublas, is busy in the Jacobins.  A Cazotte, of the Romance Diable Amoureux, is busy elsewhere:  better wert thou quiet, old Cazotte; it is a world, this, of magic become real!  All men are busy; doing they only half guess what:—­flinging seeds, of tares mostly, into the “Seed-field of time” this, by and by, will declare wholly what.

But Social Explosions have in them something dread, and as it were mad and magical:  which indeed Life always secretly has; thus the dumb Earth (says Fable), if you pull her mandrake-roots, will give a daemonic mad-making moan.  These Explosions and Revolts ripen, break forth like dumb dread Forces of Nature; and yet they are Men’s forces; and yet we are part of them:  the Daemonic that is in man’s life has burst out on us, will sweep us too away!—­One day here is like another, and yet it is not like but different.  How much is growing, silently resistless, at all moments!  Thoughts are growing; forms of Speech are growing, and Customs and even Costumes; still more visibly are actions and transactions growing, and that doomed Strife, of France with herself and with the whole world.

The word Liberty is never named now except in conjunction with another; Liberty and Equality.  In like manner, what, in a reign of Liberty and Equality, can these words, ‘Sir,’ ‘obedient Servant,’ ‘Honour to be,’ and such like, signify?  Tatters and fibres of old Feudality; which, were it only in the Grammatical province, ought to be rooted out!  The Mother Society has long since had proposals to that effect:  these she could not entertain, not at the moment.  Note too how the Jacobin Brethren are mounting new symbolical headgear:  the Woollen Cap or Nightcap, bonnet de laine, better known as bonnet rouge, the colour being red.  A thing one wears not only by way of Phrygian Cap-of-Liberty, but also for convenience’ sake, and then also in compliment to the Lower-class Patriots and Bastille-Heroes; for the Red Nightcap combines all the three properties.  Nay cockades themselves begin to be made of wool, of tricolor yarn:  the riband-cockade, as a symptom of Feuillant Upper-class temper, is becoming suspicious.  Signs of the times.