The French Revolution has a quality which all men feel; and which may be called a sudden antiquity.  Its classicalism was not altogether a cant.  When it had happened it seemed to have happened thousands of years ago.  It spoke in parables; in the hammering of spears and the awful cap of Phrygia.  To some it seemed to pass like a vision; and yet it seemed eternal as a group of statuary.  One almost thought of its most strenuous figures as naked.  It is always with a shock of comicality that we remember that its date was so recent that umbrellas were fashionable and top-hats beginning to be tried.  And it is a curious fact, giving a kind of completeness to this sense of the thing as something that happened outside the world, that its first great act of arms and also its last were both primarily symbols; and but for this visionary character, were in a manner vain.  It began with the taking of the old and almost empty prison called the Bastille; and we always think of it as the beginning of the Revolution, though the real Revolution did not come till some time after.  And it ended when Wellington and Blucher met in 1815; and we always think of it as the end of Napoleon; though Napoleon had really fallen before.  And the popular imagery is right, as it generally is in such things:  for the mob is an artist, though not a man of science.  The riot of the 14th of July did not specially deliver prisoners inside the Bastille, but it did deliver the prisoners outside.  Napoleon when he returned was indeed a revenant, that is, a ghost.  But Waterloo was all the more final in that it was a spectral resurrection and a second death.  And in this second case there were other elements that were yet more strangely symbolic.  That doubtful and double battle before Waterloo was like the dual personality in a dream.  It corresponded curiously to the double mind of the Englishman.  We connect Quatre Bras with things romantically English to the verge of sentimentalism, with Byron and “The Black Brunswicker.”  We naturally sympathise with Wellington against Ney.  We do not sympathise, and even then we did not really sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon.  Germany has complained that we passed over lightly the presence of Prussians at the decisive action.  And well we might.  Even at the time our sentiment was not solely jealousy, but very largely shame.  Wellington, the grimmest and even the most unamiable of Tories, with no French sympathies and not enough human ones, has recorded his opinion of his Prussian allies in terms of curt disgust.  Peel, the primmest and most snobbish Tory that ever praised “our gallant Allies” in a frigid official speech, could not contain himself about the conduct of Blucher’s men.  Our middle classes did well to adorn their parlours with the picture of the “Meeting of Wellington and Blucher.”  They should have hung up a companion piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands.  Then, after that meeting amid the ashes of Hougomont, where they dreamed they had trodden out the embers of all democracy, the Prussians rode on before, doing after their kind.  After them went that ironical aristocrat out of embittered Ireland, with what thoughts we know; and Blucher, with what thoughts we care not; and his soldiers entered Paris, and stole the sword of Joan of Arc.