So fleeting are the scenes of revolutionary history-so phantasmagoric are they in their character, as well from their quickly evanescent nature as from their wild and startling effect -so rapid are the changes that every day, and almost every hour, produce, that before they can be well sketched they have flitted away from before the eyes, to be replaced by others as strange and startling. Those that have been hastily transferred to the note-book are gone as soon as traced: those that follow upon the next leaf grow pale, however high and bold their colouring, by the side of the still more vivid picture that is placed in contrast the next day. The interest of the present swallows up that of the past: that of the future will shortly devour the interest of the present. In no country is the difficulty of seizing the revolutionary physiognomy before it changes, and stamping it in permanent daguerreotype, more sensible than among the easily excited, and consequently ever-changeful French-in no place on the earth more than in that fickle and capricious city, the capital of revolutionised France. There, more than elsewhere, the scenes of revolution have the attribute of dissolving views. They are before your eyes at one moment: as you still gaze, they change they run into other colours and other forms,-they have given way to a complete transformation. Such scenes have all the effect of the flickering, uncertain, and varying phantom pictures of the mirage of the desert and this effect, so observable in the outward state of things,—in the aspect of the streets, in the tumult, or the sulky calm, in the rapidly rolling panorama of the day, changed in all its objects and its colours on the morrow, is just as remarkable in moral influences, in the enthusiasm of one hour, which becomes execration in the next; in the hope, the fear, the confidence, and the despair. This is true, and perhaps even to a greater extent, in men, as well as things or deeds. Have we not seen so lately the hero, the idol, the demigod of one moment, become,

by a sudden and almost unconnected transition, the object of hatred, suspicion, and mistrust, at another? On such occasions the dissolving views have scarcely time to dissolve.

Nothing, then, is a more difficult or a more thankless task, than to sketch scenes of a revolutionary time among such a rapidly self-revolutionising people. Scarcely is the scene sketched, but it is superseded by one of newer, and consequently more powerful interest; its effect has faded utterly away; it is old, rococo, unsatisfactory: the new one alone claims every eye, and the tribute of all emotions. With such fearful expresstrain hurry and dash does history rush along, that the history of yesterday seems already "ancient" history, and the tale of the last hour "a tale of other times," no longer fit to command a thought, or excite a sensation; or, at best, it may be said to belong only to those grubbing antiquaries in political considerations, who live out of the whirling movement of their age. On those who linger among such scenes, this feeling is so powerfully impressed that they seem to themselves to grow old with frightful rapidity, and to have lived ten years at least in as many days.

Thus, in opening a Parisian Sketchbook, in which many a scene has been traced during the last few months, the feeling that the sketches therein hastily made are already too old, too "flat, stale, and unprofitable," to please the novelty-craving public eye,that even the latest, while being exhibited, may be thrown into the shade by newer and more vivid scenes, which would afford subjects for fresher pictures,-deters from their exhibition. But still there may be some of those grubbing antiquaries in revolutionary history, who may not be sorry to have a specimen of "old times " in the shape of a vignette or two drawn upon the spot, although it was done yesterday, or even the day before, placed within his hands; and so the Sketch-book shall be opened, and turned over at hap-hazard, and a few sketches of revolutionary Paris offered to public gaze.

See! first of all we fall upon a rapid tracing or two of scenes from those wild abysses, in which have sunk industry, trade, confidence, and principle the ateliers nationaux. The pencil of a moral Salvator Rosa is alone worthy to paint them! But great breadth of light and shade, and powerful colouring, must not be sought for in a scrap of a vignette. Perhaps we have not stumbled so utterly malà propos upon these pictures; for since the ateliers nationaux were so intimately connected with the pretexted causes, and the fearful organisation, of the bloody insurrection in the latter end of June, they may be supposed, as events go rattling on, to belong to the "middle ages "of the past French revolutionary history, and not to be so positively lost already in its "dark ages " as to have become utterly uninteresting.

The sketch is taken in the park of Monceaux, at the western extremity of the capital. The old trees stand there pretty nearly as they did, although some have been cut down or torn up, no one can well say why, unless it may have been from a spirit of devastation for devastation's sake; the old clumps, and the grass-plots, although sadly worn, are still there; but how different is the aspect of the spot from that which might have been sketched last year in the same sweet spring-tide! The calm and the makebelieve rurality are gone. Where nurse-maids and children gambolled on the greensward, or a couple of lovers lingered so near the tumult of the capital, and yet so secluded and unobserved, or the dreamer lounged to dream at ease, although the roar of the great city still rang in his ears, is now a scene of confusion and disorder. A herd of miserable, or idle and reckless men, have been there got together; and the spot has been allotted as one of the newly constituted revolutionary national workshops. "Workshops!" what irony in the word! Work there is none for the wretched men to do; profit there is none, at the very best, to expect from it. The impoverished and harassed country is burdened with new taxes, to keep the dangerous and disorderly in a seeming state of quiet; the fears of a government, or even its treacher

ous designs, call for funds from all the country to pay this herd of men, who prefer eating the bread of idleness as their due for have not they been told that they are the masters, and that the country must support them?-to earning their bread by the sweat of their brow, when they are enabled to do it: and all this sácrifice shall not hereafter avert the danger anticipated by those fears.

The first impression conveyed by the scene is that, some how or other, we have been suddenly transported into the "back woods" of a Transatlantic settlement. A few huts of wood are knocked up in different parts under the trees, for the use of those paid superintendents who have nothing to superintend, and who only aid in fostering the passions of the wild men whom they are vainly said to have under their command, and in organising into revolutionary bands, to work the will of a disappointed and frantic party, a host of half-savage beings, disorganised to every social tie. The hundreds of half-dressed men who are grouped hither and thither, with instruments of labour in their hands, might be supposed, were they really employed upon any exertion, to be the settlers, occupied in effecting a clear

ance.

Some even might be taken, from their wild looks and wilder gestures, for a few of the last remnants of the aboriginal savages, who had just sold the heritage of their fathers for deep draughts of the "fire-water." But when we look more nearly to the details in the composition of the picture, we shall find component parts of it perfectly exceptional, and peculiarly belonging to the circumstances of the place and of the day. Some of the men in the groups, it is true, bear all the air of sturdy workmen, although they are demoralised by their position of real idleness, that "root of all evil," and disgusted with having their energies employed upon "make-believe" work. "Make-believe" indeed! for children could scarcely be seduced into the fantasy that they were really doing any labour of positive utility. Some again are strong men, capable of bearing exertion as settlers or forest clearers; but they are not the men of the "woods and wilds." Those hands plunged down into the deep pockets of

their full trowsers, without the least show of willingness to work; those heads tossed back, that sharp cunning roll of the evil eye, that leer, that sardonic grin, that mouth carelessly pursed up to whistle, all betray the common city thief, who knows not why he should not share in the bounty of the country to the idle and disorderly, particularly when his own trade thrives so ill in these days of the patrollings and marchings, and drummings about the streets, by night as well as day, of the national guards: among those faces, also, we may find the dark scowl of the branded felon and the murderer. But look at those pale puny men, with their lank hair and scanty beards! How out of place they seem in these "backwoods" of civilisation! How miserably they hang their heads, and look upon the earth! They are the poor weavers, and fabricators of jewellery, and makers of all kinds of articles of luxury, whose trade is closed to them by the ruin caused to all wealth and luxury by the revolution, and who are out of employ. They are real objects of charity and they are true objects of pity also, as they thus stand, unable and unwilling to work at their useless trades, and brood over their misery, and think of their wives and babes, for whom they, who might have before earned a decent livelihood, must now beg, from a nation's reckless charity, a scanty subsistence. Poor woe-begone wretches! they have cursed the revolution in the bitterness of their hearts; although by a strange but not uncommon revulsion of feeling, they will throw themselves, perhaps, soon into the arms of their enemy, and espouse, in despair, its wildest, bloodiest doctrines, with the hope that any change, however desperate,may tend to relieve them from their utter misery, but to find out, at last, that they have plunged into a still more fearful abyss. Look! in that corner, beneath that further clump of trees, are some who have thrown themselves gloomily upon the ground, to dream of a gloomy future; or lean their backs against the stems, to raise their eyes despairingly to heaven; or see! perhaps they laugh wildly, to affect a gaiety far from their hearts. Poor fellows! The deity they have worshipped is thrown down from the

high pedestal on which they had put her up aloft, or one is replaced by another, wearing a hideously coarse red cap of liberty; their fair dream, in which they lived, has flown, with its bright rainbow colours, and left before them nothing but a naked, rugged, hideous reality; the poetry, as well as the necessary materialism of their lives, have been cut off at once; the pleasant sward, on which they trod forward, with daisies pied," has terminated on a sudden, upon an abyss formed by the unexpected convulsion of an earthquake. Their divinity was Art; she has fled with a sob before the advance of coarse democracy, that proclaims her a useless and foolish idol. Their dream was the worship in the temple of Art; the temple has fallen to the ground, and the rainbow coruscations of its altar have vanished. The path which was to lead on to fame and fortune has abruptly terminated. There is no hand to foster the neglected and degraded deity; the poor artists, who were just commencing their career, are now reduced to penury: for the most part, these poor orphan children of art are pennilessalmost houseless; they have been forced to lay aside the brush for the spade or pick-axe-the brightlycoloured pallet for the dull earth; and now they brood here, in the ateliers nationaux, over their fantasies flown and their real misery-happy even that they can receive the national pittance to prevent them from starving. Look to those young men, sprinkled here and there in the groups-boys they are almost sometimes-with their thin delicate mustaches, and their hair arranged with some coquetry of curl, even in the midst of their disorder, and in spite of the blouse with which their attire is covered. Look at their hands! they are white and delicatethey are not used to handle the implements of labour. If they work, the drops of perspiration trickle over their pale faces like tears which will find a passage, even if the eyes refuse to let them go. They have been evidently used, the weak boys, to a certain degree of luxury, and their harsh occupation is repugnant to their feelings. They are young lads from the many shops of the luxuries of manufacture

of every kind in formerly flourishing Paris, which have now closed in consequence of the ruin and desolation that has fallen upon trade. Those who have not shut up entirely, have discharged the greater part of their former servitors, who now are turned adrift in hundreds upon the pavé of Paris, and know not how or where to seek their bread. Those hands have been accustomed to handle the velvet, the satin, and the lace, and shrink back from the contact of the rough wood and cutting stone: but starve they cannot, and they add to the wild motley crew of the ateliers nationaux. Those discontented affected faces are those of young actors, and singers also, improvident to a proverb, who have been left exposed to the rude buffetings of the world by the failure of several of the theatres, which have not been able to meet the necessities of revolutionary times, when even Parisians even theatrical Parisians desert the theatres for the club-rooms, and which have closed their bankrupt doors. What a change, again, from the illusion of the glittering dress, and the lighted scene, and the heartfluttering applause, to the stern realities of poverty and labour. Among such men as these are young rising authors also, who have thrown aside the uncertain resource of the pen for the scanty but sure return of public charity, with a pretence of labour. The ateliers nationaux have become the only salvation, in the suspension of literature as well as art, of the poor poet or novelist who does not dip his pen in the black gall of ultra-republican democracy, and earn a scanty subsistence as journalist in one of the "thousand and one " new violent republican journals of the day-for such a one alone can find his reader and his profit. But such figures as these among the groups are the bright lights, sad as they may be, of the picture. The greatest mass of the herd of so-called workmen consists of those accustomed to labour and to hardship, or of those who have been inured to play all parts, and fill all situations, by long acquaintance with all the necessities of crime.

What a strange scene these pensioners of the republican government form!-stranger still when the nature

of the supposed work upon which they are believed to be engaged is considered. It is not by any means the half of the assembled herd, however, that makes any show of working at all. See! several hundreds of men are moving backwards and forwards, with wheelbarrows, over the more vacant spaces of the now desolate-looking park; they move from a hole to a heap, from a heap to a hole. At the one, men are lazily making a pretext of digging up the earth-at the other, of shovelling it upon a mound. To what purpose? To none whatever. When the heap begins to grow too big not to be added to without exertion, it is again demolished; the earth is wheeled off elsewhere; another heap of earth is made upon another spot, or the hole that has been made is again filled. It is the endless task of the Danaïdes, condemned to fill a bottomless tun, on which they are engaged; or it is that of the web of Penelope, undone as soon as done : but it is without the advantage of the punishment of the one, or of the purpose of the other. But see, in the back-ground, a party have grown ashamed of the futile absurdity of the employment upon which they are vainly engaged. In order to give a faint and frivolous colouring to their acceptation of their wages of idleness, they have thrown down their misused implements, and, like a party of schoolboys, they have put their so-called superintendents into their wheelbarrows, and are wheeling them up and down amidst shouts and cries, and yells of the hideous Ca Ira. This, however, is but poor sport in comparison with the recreation that many of the national workmen permit themselves, for the good of the nation.

For instance, those knots of men which stand here and there, in thick encircling masses, whence issues the sound of many voices of declamation, of shouts, or of murmurs-and where now and then heads may be seen of eager and wildly-gesticulating orators, who have mounted upon the bottoms of upturned wheel-barrows in order to spout-have formed themselves into al fresco clubs, in which they, the masters and arbiters of the destinies of the country, as they have been taught to believe themselves, are set

tling the affairs of the nation according to their own views, or rather according to the frantic opinions instilled into them as a poisonous draught, rushing like fire through their veins, and disturb ing and corrupting the whole system, by the violent demagogic orators of a furious disappointed party, whom they imitate second-hand, and naturally caricature, if possible, to a still greater excess of anarchist doctrine. Listen to them! under the hot-bed fostering influence of the ateliers nationaux, or rather of their instigators and supporters, they have got far beyond Louis Blanc, the high-priest of the one deity of the Republican trinity, Egalité, and his utopian talent-levelling theories for the organisation of labour. Listen to the declamations that come rolling forth from these crowds. They are illustrative of communistic doctrines to the utmost limits of communism. The declaration that all property in land is a spoliation of the people, and a crying iniquity-that the soil of the earth belongs to the community, to the nation at large; that it must all be confiscated, seized, and placed in the hands of the Res publica, to be administered for the public good; that the profits of its culture must be distributed equally amongst all-is but the A B C of the long alphabet of communistic principles, which they proclaim in the name of humanity, and to the advantage of themselves. It is needless to run through every letter. The omega-the great O-which is to prove the result of all their declamations, is, that if the National Assembly does not decree this general confisca tion, they will take up arms against it; that they have once made the stones of the street rise at their command, and that they will make them rise again, when the time shall come, to do once more their bidding. And how have they kept their word? The bloodred standard of that fantastic vision of blood, the République Sociale et Démocratique, the Republic of spoliation and destruction, is raised aloft in the ateliers nationaux, to be planted hereafter upon the deadly barricades of June. And round these open conspiracies, under the sky of heaven, and in the face of men, see, there stand the brigadiers, and superintendents and masters put over them by the

All

government, with their hands in their pockets; and they listen and applaud. Look, also, at the furious frown of the orator on the wheel-barrow, in the midst of his yelling companions of the national workshops. How he knits his brows, and rolls his eyes, with a tiger aspect! This is all "make-believe" again; for he thinks it necessary for an "only true and pure" republican to make a terrible face, to the alarm and terror of all supposed aristocrats. Republicans did it, and were painted so in former days; and, to be a real republican, he must do the same: and his associates follow his example, and frown, and roar, and denounce like himself. this is playing a part. But when they have learned by heart the part that they are rehearsing now, under yon trees, in the transmogrified park of Monceaux, they will play it as their own to the life-nay, to the death! If we were to approach that fellow in the blouse there, who is lying on his back on a hillock, reposing from his fatigues of doing nothing, and jerking lazy puffs of blue-white smoke into the pure spring air from the short clay-pipe that almost seems to grow out of his mass of beard, we may get perhaps to some comprehension of the tenets of the braves ouvriers of the ateliers nationaux; for, after all, although we are gentlemen, and he weens himself our lord and master, he looks like a bon homme, and he may condescend to expound to us his principles of "liberty, equality, and fraternity," upon the best-avowed communist, socialist, and ultra-republican system. Let us ask him who are the people? It is we-we who have nothing, and are not rascally thievish proprietors-we are the people; and the sovereignty of the people belongs to us, he will tell you. If you insinuate to him that, according to the laws of equality, you ought to have your own little share of this sovereignty, he will reply-No such thingyou are not of the people, you are a bourgeois, a mange-tout, an accapareur, a riche, a fainéant (what is he doing?) an aristocrate: this last word is the climax of the terms of objurgation. Endeavour to explain to him, or to convey by inuendo, that "aristocrats," in all languages, mean