in the Italian Boulevards. Here the decrees of the fragments of the National Assembly were read and approved. The three great measures of the President on the first day of the movement had been so successfully and suddenly executed that resistance in order to be efficient must be deliberate. Those three measures were the arrest of dangerous persons; the occupation of the Hall of the Assembly; and the distribution of troops, to the number of fifty thousand, to all the necessary portions of the capital. Apprehensive of an impending conflict, the stores and shops remained closed during Wednesday; although the Boulevards were crowded with people. At three P.M., Louis Napoleon boldly rode with several attendants along the principal streets, and reviewed a division of cavalry in the Champs Elysées. In the evening the presidential palace was thrown open, and a general reception took place. The success of the coup d'état was now regarded as certain by the majority of the inhabitants of the capital, as was evinced by the large number of prominent personages who, on that occasion, tendered their services and allegiance to the President. Paris remained tranquil. The theatres were all crowded in the evening. Never had a more brilliant and splendid audience graced the Italian Opera. The capital seemed as much as ever the gay centre of the world's luxury, magnificence and vice. But Thursday, the great day of carnage and blood, was rapidly approaching.

Louis Napoleon, anticipating the coming danger, had prepared for it. The morning light revealed to the astonished Parisians, long and almost endless lines of soldiers drawn up on both sides of the Boulevards, and on all the great thoroughfares. The soldiers had been abundantly supplied with brandy before leaving their barracks; and they were disposed to be furious and bloody. The opposing factions had been at work, and this was the day upon which they resolved to try their strength. They had determined that France should not be surrendered to the usurper without a desperate struggle. The following appeal, among others, was posted on the Boulevards, signed by Victor Hugo: "Art. 68. The Constitution is entrusted to the protection and patriotism of the French citizens. Louis Napoleon is outlawed. The state of siege is abolished.

Universal suffrage is re-established. Vive la République. To arms! For the United Mountain."

Early in the morning, barricades were erected in many of the streets. They were attacked and taken by the troops with little difficulty. At one of these, the representative Baudin was killed; and he was the first who fell. The minister of war published a proclamation, advising all the inhabitants of the capital to remain in their houses, and declaring that all who were found defending the barricades, or taken with arms in their hands, should be shot. The chief barricades had been erected in the neighborhood of the Porte St. Denis, the Porte St. Martin, and in the streets adjacent to them. The troops were quietly demolishing these until twelve o'clock in the forenoon. St. Arnaud, the Minister of War, had entrusted the conduct of affairs on this critical occasion to General Magnan. As the middle of the day approached, the excitement throughout the capital became more and more intense. Still the troops made no hostile demonstration, and their apparent reluctance filled the Red Republicans with hope. The streets were now full of tumultuous crowds; and at two o'clock the general order was given to all the troops to advance simultaneously and clear the streets. They obeyed. The division which marched. along the Boulevards was fired upon from the roofs and windows; and then an irregular battle ensued, which continued for several hours. Many were slain on both sides. The streets were thus gradually cleared; but the ground was covered with the bodies of the dying and the dead. Some were killed who took no share whatever in the conflict, but had been drawn by curiosity to their windows. As the soldiers could not distinguish between friends and foes, many innocent persons fell victims to their imprudence and carelessness.

During several hours the capital was the scene of an irregular conflict; but by five o'clock in the afternoon all was over. Tranquillity was again restored. The victorious troops retained possession of the streets; the vanquished citizens and insurgents remained concealed in their houses. The dead were quickly buried, and numerous patrols, which scoured the city in all directions, arrested every person whose appearance

and movements were in the least degree suspicious. During Thursday night, silence, not unmingled with terror, pervaded the capitol. When Friday dawned, no sign of resistance was exhibited. The opposing factions had been completely crushed. The troops marched through every part of the city, but no foe appeared. The bold coup d'état of the President had been completely successful. He who had blundered and failed so ignominiously at Strasburg and Boulogne had triumphed gloriously in Paris.

The number of killed and wounded during this memorable struggle has been variously estimated. The most reliable supposition is that which places the number of slain at 235, and the wounded at 400. Of these, there were 30 killed and 180 wounded on the part of the soldiers. Throughout the country the excitement became intense. There were insurrections in twenty-five departments at once. The Socialists were at the bottom of these movements, and their fury was expended against all those who represented order, wealth, rank and respectability. In some places the churches were burned, the priests were assaulted, women were outraged; murder, pillage, and conflagration prevailed. But all these disorders were gradually put down by the army and by the decisive and rapid measures adopted by the President. At the conclusion of this memorable week all the disturbances were quelled; order again reigned throughout France, the capital was tranquil, the dead were buried, the wounded were conveyed to the hospitals, the most active and dangerous anarchists were imprisoned, the Assembly was obliterated, and Louis Napoleon had realized at last the life-long aspiration of his heart; the dying prayer of Hortense was at length fulfilled, and her son, the heir of the great Napoleon, had become the absolute ruler of France !-S. M. SCHMUCKER.

rope," says he, "almost before I began to live;" and, in fact, at five years of age he had already been carried from Besançon to Elba, from Elba to Paris, from Paris to Rome, from Rome to Naples, had played at the foot of Vesuvius, and with his father had chased Italian brigands across the mountains of Calabria.

On his return to France in 1809, his education, already commenced by so large an experience of the world, was continued by the aid of books. He learned the rudiments of the classics in an ancient convent near his mother's dwelling,

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where he passed two years of domestic serenity and quiet study. It was his fortune to read Tacitus with an old royalist general, a proscribed refugee, who found a hiding place from the imperial police at the house of Madame Hugo (herself a royalist), and a fugitive in early revolutionary days from the famous Vendean army. Some years later the father of Victor Hugo, now become a general, and appointed majordomo of King Joseph Bonaparte's palace at Madrid, removed thither with his wife and children. Under the brilliant sky of Spain, on her picturesque and storied soil, rich in old historic memories, and then agitated by war, the young Victor received indelible impressions, and his mind still preserved some tint of the Gothic and Moorish spirit of that land. To this brief sojourn in the peninsula, at this early and impressionable age, he doubtless owed much of that bold and lofty reach of thought, that Castilian march of verse, and that southern exuberance of imagination which so greatly distinguish his writings.

Already, at the age of ten years, the poetic demon possessed him, and asserted its sway over his susceptible nature. At the age when most boys begin to speak in prose, he began to murmur forth vague and confused melodies. Gradually ripening his powers, at the age of sixteen he sent to the French Academy two odes, which were both publicly crowned. From that moment the young poet began to astonish France by the precocity and the variety of his genius. His soul poured itself forth in streams of song, vigorous, irregular, but brilliant and burning as a stream of lava. M. de Chateaubriand, then at the zenith of his own literary fame, decorated Hugo with the title of "L'enfant sublime."

His convictions soon underwent an irresistible change; the fervor of his royalism abated, and his early bias toward his mother's political creed was gradually overcome, till it was wholly merged in a true and hearty sympathy with the people. This showed itself first by his becoming a leader among the Romanticists in opposition to those who still sought to fetter modern genius with rules derived from study of the classics of antiquity. Hugo's dramatic writings played an important part in the struggle between the opposing schools.