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Excerpt from My Second Country The title of this book has not been chosen at random: it is literally true. France has been my home for more than twelve years, but it was already my second country long before I went to live there. Indeed I cannot remember a time when France had not a large place in my affections. Among my earliest recollections are the pictures of the Franco German War of 1870 in the bound volumes of the Illustrated London News which we had at home. Perhaps my elders who showed and explained the pictures to me were themselves Francophile; they must have been, or how should I at that early age have been filled, as I was, with enthusiasm for the cause of France and indignation at the wrongs that she had suffered? Later on Victor Hugo and Swinburne intensified my love and admiration for France and gave it a more reasoned basis; France became for me the country of the Revolution, the symbol of democracy and republicanism. Since then my opinions on almost every subject have Changed more than once, as must the opinions of any man that has lived more than fifty years in this world, unless his existence has been that of a vegetable, but the enthusiasm for revolutionary and republican France has never changed or diminished. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.