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 delight" the assassination in its turn of republican France while yet red-handed from the blood of republican Rome. But it was not for the greatest of those among her sons who had resisted that execrable wrong, and being innocent of bloodguiltiness had suffered in expiation of it for nineteen years of exile—it was not for Hugo, and it is not for us, to cast in her teeth the reproach of her sin now that it has been atoned for by a heroic agony. Yet in reading these ardent and profuse invocations of France as prophetess and benefactress, fountain of light and symbol of right, we must feel now and then that some recognition of past wrong-doing, some acknowledgment of treason and violence done against the right and the light of the world, would have added weight and force to the expression of a patriotism which in default of it may be open to the enemy's charge of vulgar and uncandid partisanship, of blind and one-sided provinciality. From these as from all other charges of narrowness or shallowness, want of culture, of judgment, and of temperance, we would fain see the noble ardour and loving passion of his faith as demonstrably clear in all men's eyes as in the main it is at bottom to those who can read it aright! To have admitted that the empire was not simply a crime and a shame imposed on France as though by accident, but an inevitable indemnity demanded for her sin against her own high mission and honour, for the indulgence of greed and envy, of the lust after mean renown and unrighteous power which is the deformed and vicious parody of that virtue of patriotism whose name it takes in vain to make it hateful, of the arrogant and rancorous jealousy which impelled her baser politicians to play the