Note 105 — Front matter (continued 3)
Reading edition
"What a spectacle for France! Six hundred inorganic individuals, essential for its regeneration and salvation, sit there on their elliptic benches longing passionately toward life, in painful durance, like souls waiting to be born. Speeches are spoken, eloquent, audible within doors and without. Mind agitates itself against mind; the nation looks on with ever deeper interest. Thus do the Commons deputies sit incubating."—Carlyle, vol. i., p. 148.