his reliance on such an invitation. Like Euclio, but with more bated breath and whispering humbleness, he will ask for a look at the hands which are put forth to point out the new letters of his unfamiliar lesson; and in some cases it may perhaps be pardonable if he should even add with the bewildered and agonised miser of the grand rough old comedy, 'Show the third hand too.' There might haply be more of rational meaning and sound sense than would at once appear under the seeming distraction of such a hopeless and delirious form of demand. The men who ridicule the vanity and imbecility of Russophobia may chance to remind him of the men who denounce the oppressive and ill-grounded principle of compulsory vaccination; and if he happen to object to free-trade in Panslavism or small-pox or any such other contagion, he will hardly be inclined to take part as it were on trust with the advocates or the supporters of a society for the propagation and circulation of either or of any kindred disease in politics or in physics. If the hands be the hands of murder though the voice be the voice of mercy,—if the hands be the hands of Russia though the voice be the voice of deliverance,—he will, to borrow from the Master's lips a metaphor together with a counsel, have exactly as much reliance on the good intentions of a Czar as on the lachrymal gland of a crocodile.
But although, as we said just now, there may be no nation left in Europe, since the day and long before the day when Mr. Tennyson uttered on behalf of forsaken Poland the noble first war-note of youth
