Boston, December 1848.

The Year of Constitutions is drawing to its end, to be succeeded, I doubt not, by the Year of Substitutions. I am sorry, my Basil, that you do not quite agree with me as to the issue of all this in France; but I am sure you will not dispute my opinion that this year's work is good for nothing, so far as it has attempted construction, instead of fulfilling its mission by overthrow. Its great folly has been the constitution-fever, which has amounted to a pestilence. When mushrooms grow to be oaks, then shall such constitutions as this year has bred, stand a chance of outliving their authors. Will men learn nothing from the past? How can they act over such rotten farces,—make themselves such fools!

You admit the difference, which I endeavoured to show you, between the American constitution and that of any conceivable constitution which may be cooked up for an old European state. I am glad if I have directed your attention, accordingly, to the great mistake of France. She supposes that a feeble, and debauched old gentleman can boil himself in the revolutionary kettle, and emerge in all the tender and enviable freshness of the babe just severed from the maternal mould. Politicians have committed a blunder in not allowing the natural, and hence legitimate, origin of the American constitution in that of its British parent. They have thus favoured the theory that a tolerably permanent constitution can be drafted a priori, and imposed upon a state. This is the absurdity that makes revolutions. If the silly French, instead of reading De Tocqueville, would study each for himself the history of our constitution, and see how gradually it grew to be our constitution, before pen was put to paper to draft it, they might perhaps stop their abortive nonsense in time, to save what they can of their national character from the eternal contempt of mankind.

But you cannot think the French will find so fair a destiny as a Restoration! Tell me, in what French party, at present existing, there is any inherent strength, save in that of the legitimists? Other parties are mere factions; but the legitimists have got a seminal principle among them, which dies very hard, and of which the nature is to sprout and make roots, and then show itself. I am no admirer of the Bourbons: their intrigues with Jesuitism have been their curse, and are the worst obstacle to their regaining a hold on the sympathies of freemen. The reactionary party have in vain endeavoured to overcome it for fifty years. Yet there is such tenacity of life in legitimacy, that it seems to me destined to outlive all opposition, and to succeed by necessity. The rapid developments of this memorable year strengthen the probability of my prediction. Revolutionism is spasmodic, but not so long in dying as it used to be. I cannot but think this year has done more for a permanent restoration of the Bourbons than any year since Louis XVI. ascended the scaffold. In this respect the Barricades of 1848 may tell more impressively on history than the Allies of 1814, or even the carnage of Waterloo.

Why should I be ashamed of my theory, when everything, so far, has gone as I supposed it would, only a hundred times more rapidly than any body could have thought possible? What must be the residue of a series which thus far has tended but one way?—what say you of the Bartholomew-butchery in June?—what of Lamartine's fall?—what of the dictatorship of Cavaignac? If things have gone as seems probable, Louis Napoleon is president of the republic. If so, what is the instinct which has thus called him into power? The hereditary principle is abolished on paper, and instantly recognised by the first popular act done under the new constitution! But, for all we can tell in America, things may have taken another turn. Is Cavaignac elected? Then a military master is put over the republic, who can Cromwellise the Assembly, and Monk the state, as soon as he chooses. The republic has given itself the form of a dictatorship, and demonstrated that it does not exist, except on paper. Has there been an insurrection? Then the republic is dead already. But I shall assume that Louis has succeeded: then it is virtually an hereditary empire. To be sure, instinct has for once failed to know "the true prince,"—has accorded, to the mere shadow of a usurper, what, in a more substantial form, is due to the heir of France; but long-suspended animation must make a mistake or two in coming to life again. The events of the year have been all favourable to a restoration, because they have crushed a thousand other plans and plottings for the sovereignty, and because they must have forced upon at least as many theorists the grand practical conclusion, that there is to be no rational liberty in France until she returns to first principles, and finds the repose which old nations can only know under their legitimate kings.

I am ashamed of you for more than hinting that legitimacy must be given up, as far as kings are concerned. Alas! Diogenes must light his lantern, and hunt through England for a Tory! You are bewhigged, indeed, if you give it up that George III. was a legitimate king, and that his grand-daughter is to you what no other person alive can possibly be,—your true and hereditary sovereign lady! Must I, a republican, say this to an English monarchist, who votes himself a conservative, and who is the son of a sturdy old English Tory? Is there no virtue extant, that even you allow yourself to be flippant about "the divinity that hedges kings," and to trifle with suggestions which your immortal ancestor, who fell at Prestonpans, would have drummed out of doors with poker and tongs? Why, even I, who have a right to be whatever I choose, by way of amateur allegiance, and who have always found myself a Jacobite whenever the talk has been against the White Rose—even I, in sober earnest, yield the point, that George I. was a legitimate sovereign, and that Charlie was a bit of a rebel. Those stupid Dutchmen! it makes me mad to say as much for them; but I love Old England too well to own that she bore with such sovereigns on any lower grounds than that of their right to reign.

I am sorry you give in to the silly cant of revolutionists, and confess yourself posed with their challenge. What if they do insist upon a definition? Are you bound to keep your heart from beating till you can tell why it throbs over a page of Shakspeare's Richard II., and bounces, in precisely an opposite manner, over Carlyle's Cromwell? Am I going to let a Whig choke me with a dictionary, because it contains no explanation of my good old-fashioned word? Let him, with his "Useful Knowledge Society" information, give me an explanation of the magnetic needle, or tell me why it turns to the pole, and not to the antipodes? The fellow will recollect some twopenny picture of the compass, and retail me half a column of the Penny Magazine about the mysteries of nature. And what if I talk as sensibly from nature in my own heart, and tell the stereotype philosopher that I am conscious of an ennobling affection, which honest men never lack, and which God Almighty has made a faculty of the human soul to dignify subordination; and that loyalty has no lode-star but legitimacy? At least, my dear Whigo-Tory, you must allow, I should succeed in answering a fool according to his folly. But I claim more: I have defined legitimacy when I say it is the home of loyalty.

I have amused myself during the summer with some study of the history of reaction in France, and flatter myself that I have discovered the secret of its failure, and the great distinction between its spirit and that of English Conservatism. But this by the way; for I was going to say that I have found, in the writings of one of the chief of the reactionary party, some very sensible hints upon the subject I am discussing with you. Though in many respects a dangerous teacher, and, I fear, a little jesuitical in practice as well as in theory, I have been surprised to find the Count de Maistre willing "to be as his master" on this point, and to rest legitimacy very nearly on the sober principles of Burke. He is far from the extravagances of Sir Robert Filmer, though he often expresses, in a startling form, the temperate views of English Anti-Jacobins. Thus he says, with evident relish of its smart severity, the people will always accept their masters, and will never choose them. Strongly and unpalatably put, but most coincident with history, and not to be disputed by any admirer of the glorious Revolution of 1688! I suspect the Frenchman made his aphorism without stopping to ask whether it suited any other case. But Burke has virtually said the same thing in his reply to the Old Jewry doctrine of 1789, in which he so forcibly urges the fact, that the settlement of the crown upon William and the Georges "was not properly a choice, ... but an act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense in which necessity can be taken." Mary and the Hanoverians, then, were acknowledged by the nation, in spite of itself, as legitimate sovereigns; and even William was smuggled into the acknowledgment as quasi-legitimate. It is the clear, reasonable, and truly English doctrine of Burke, that the constitution of a country makes its legitimate kings; and that the princes of the House of Brunswick, coming to the crown according to constitutional law, at the date of their respective accessions, were as legitimate as King James before he broke his coronation oaths, and abdicated, ipso facto, his crown and hereditary rights. But De Maistre talks more like the schoolmen, though he comes to the same practical results. Constitutions, the native growth of their respective countries, he would argue, are the ordinance of God; and kings, though not the subjects of their people, are bound to do homage to them, as, in a sense, divine. Legitimacy, therefore, is the resultant of hereditary majesty and constitutional designation; it being always understood that constitutional laws are never written till after they become such by national necessities, which are divine providences. Apply this to 1688. The Bill of Rights was an unwritten part of the constitution even when James was crowned; and so was the principle, that the king must not be a Papist, at least in the government of his realms. Such, if I may so speak, was the Salic law of England, by which his public and political Popery stripped him of his right to the throne. It was the same principle that invested the House of Brunswick with a legitimacy which the heart of the nation did not hesitate to recognise, in spite of unfeigned disgust with the prince in whom the succession was established. To throw the proposition into the abstract—there can be no legitimacy without hereditary majesty, but that member of a royal line is the legitimate king in whom concur all the elements of constitutional designation. If the phrase be new, the idea is as old as empire. I mean that constitutional power which, without reference to national choice or personal popularity, selects the true heir of the throne, among the descendants of its ancient possessors, on fixed principles of national law. Thus, in Portugal, the constitution sets aside an idiot heir-apparent for a cadet of the same family, or, if need be, for a collateral relative; while, in France, it proclaims the line of a king extinct in his female heir, and ascends, perhaps, to a remote ancestor for a trace of his rightful successor. It is a principle essentially the same which, in England, pronounces a Popish prince as devoid of hereditary right to the crown, as a bastard, or the child of a private marriage; and by which the hereditary blood, shut off from its natural course, immediately opens some auxiliary channel, and widens it into the main artery of succession, with all the precision of similar resources in physical nature. With such an argument, if I understand him, the Count de Maistre would put you to the blush for sneering sub ros at the legitimacy of your Sovereign. I wish his principles were always as capable of being put to the proof, without any absurdity in the reduction. Hereditary majesty is the only material of which constitutions make sovereigns; and that, too, deserves a word in the light which this sage Piedmontese Mentor of France has endeavoured to throw on the subject. It is interesting in the present dilemma of France, which stands like the ass between two haystacks—rejecting one dynasty, but not yet choosing another. I am a republican, you know, holding that my loyalty is due to the constitution of my own country; and yet I subscribe to the doctrine that this idea of majesty is a reality, and that, confess it or not, even republicans feel its reality. The king's name is a tower of strength; and inspiration has said to sovereign princes, with a pregnant and monitory meaning—ye are gods. This is not the fawning of courts, but the admonition of Him who invests them with His sword of avenging justice, and gives them, age after age, the natural homage of their fellow-men. Not that I would flatter monarchs: I see that they die like men, and, what is worse, live, very often, like fools, if not like beasts. Yet I am sure that they have something about them which is personally theirs, and cannot be given to others, and which is as real a thing as any other possession. God has endowed them with history, and they are the living links which connect nations with their origin, and the men of the passing age with bygone generations. Reason about it as we may, it is impossible not to look with natural reverence on the breathing monuments of venerable antiquity. For a Guelph, indeed, I cannot get up any false or romantic enthusiasm; and yet I find it quite as impossible not to feel that the house of Guelph entitles its royal members to a degree of consideration which is the ordinance of Heaven. For how many ages has that house been a great reality, casting its shadow over Europe, and stretching it over the world, and as absolutely affecting the destinies of men as the geographical barriers and highways of nations! The Alps and the Oceans are morally, as well as naturally, majestic; and a moral majesty like theirs attaches to a line of princes which has stood the storms of centuries like them, and like them has been always a bulwark or a bond between races and generations. Like the solemnity of mountains is the hereditary majesty of a family, of which the origin is veiled in the twilight of history, but which is always seen above the surface of cotemporary events, a crowned and sceptred thing that never dies, but perpetuates, from generation to generation, a still increasing emotion of sublimity and awe, which all men feel, and none can fully understand. There are many women in England who, for personal qualities and graces, would as well become the throne as she whom you so loyally entitle "Our Sovereign Lady." Why is it that no election, nor any imaginable possession of her place, could commend the proudest or the best of them to the homage of the nation's heart? Such a one might wear the robes, and glitter like a star, outshining the regalia, and might walk like Juno; but not a voice would cry God save her!—while there is a glory, not to be mistaken, which invests the daughter of ancient sovereigns, even when she is recognised, against her will, in the costume of travel, or when she shows herself among her people, and treads the heather in a trim little bonnet and a Highland plaid. Why is it that ten thousand feel a thrill when her figure is seen descending from the wooden walls of her empire, and alighting upon some long unvisited portion of its soil? It is not the same emotion which would be inspired by the landing of Wellington. Then the roaring of cannon and the waving of ensigns would appear to be a tribute rendered to the hero by a grateful country; but when her Majesty touches the shore, she seems herself to wake the thunders and to bow the banners which announce her coming. The pomp is all her own, and differs from the tributary pageant, as the nod of Jove is different from the acclamation of Stentor. Even I, who "owe her no subscription," can well conceive what a true Briton cannot help but feel, when, with an ennobling loyalty, he beholds in her the concentrated blood of famous kings, and the propagated soul of mighty monarchs; and when he calls to mind, at the same moment, the thousand strange events and glorious histories which have their august and venerable issue in Victoria, his queen.

But you will bring me back to my main business, by asking—who, then, was the legitimate king of France at the beginning of this year? The King of the Barricades was not lacking in hereditary majesty, and you will make out a case of constitutional designation, by a parallel between England in 1688, and France in 1830. If you do so, you will greatly wrong your country. The loyalty of England settled in the house of Brunswick, and would have been even less tried if there had been a continuance of the house of Orange; but no French loyalist could ever be reconciled to the dynasty of Orleans. And why? It was not the natural constitution of France, but the mere blunder of a mob, that selected Louis Philippe as the king of the French. It was an election, as the accession of William and Mary was not: it was a choice, and not a necessity—the mere caprice of the hour, and in no sense the rational designation of law. Did ever his Barricade Majesty himself, in all his dreams of a dynasty, pretend that any unalterable principle, or fundamental law of France, had turned the tide of succession from the heir-presumptive of Charles X., and forced heralds upon the backward trail of genealogy, till they could again descend, and so find the hereditary king of the French in the son of EgalitÉ? Louis Philippe was not legitimate, in any reasonable sense of the word; and, could he have made such men as Chateaubriand regard him as other than a usurper, he would not be at Claremont now. That splendid Frenchman uttered the voice of a smothered, but not extinguished, constitution, when he closed his political life in 1830, by saying to the Duchess de Berry—"Madame, votre fils est mon roi." He lived to see the secret heart of thousands of his countrymen repeating his memorable words, and died not till Providence itself had overturned the rival throne, and directed every eye in hope, or in alarm, to the only prince in Europe who could claim to be their king.

I care very little what may be the personal qualifications of Henry of Bordeaux; it seems to me that he is destined to reign upon the throne of his ancestors—and God grant he may do it in such wise as shall make amends for all that France has suffered, by reason of his ancestors, since France had a Henry for her king before! The prestige of sovereignty is his; and while he lives, no republic can be lasting; no government, save his, can insure the peace which the state of Europe so imperatively demands. If "experience has taught England that in no other course or method than that of an hereditary crown her liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred,"[12]—why should not an experience, a thousandfold severer, teach France the same lesson? It has already been taught them by a genius which France cannot despise, and to whose oracular voice she is now forced to listen, because it issues from his fresh grave! "Legitimacy is the very life of France. Invent, calculate, combine all sorts of illegitimate governments, you will find nothing else possible as the result, nothing which gives any promise of duration, of tolerable existence during a course of years, or even through several months. Legitimacy is, in Europe, the sanctuary in which alone reposes that sovereignty by which states subsist." So I endeavour to render the eloquent sentence of Chateaubriand;[13] and though, since he wrote it, a score of years have passed, it is stronger now than ever—for what was then his prophecy is already the deplorable history of his country. Had ever a country such a history, without learning more in a year than France has gained from a miserable half-century?

Just so long as France has been busy with experiments, in the insane effort to separate her future from her past, just so long have all her labours to lay a new foundation been miserable failures, covering her, in the eyes of the world, with shame and infamy. What has been wanting all the time? I grant that the first want has been a national conscience—a sense of religion and of duty. But I mean, what has been wanting to the successive administrations and governments? Certainly not splendour and personal dignity, for the Imperial government had both; and the King of the Barricades made himself to be acknowledged and feared as one who bore not the sword in vain. But the prestige of legitimacy was wanting; and that want has been the downfall of everything that has been tried. You will ask, what was the downfall of Charles X? The answer is, that it was not a downfall further than concerned himself; for everybody feels that the Bourbon claim survives, while every other has been forced to yield to destiny and retribution. How is it that legitimacy makes itself felt after years of exile and obscurity? Is it not that instinct of loyalty which cannot be duped or diverted, and which detects and detests all shams? Is it not the instinct which constitution-makers have endeavoured to appease by pageants and by names, but which has continually revolted against the emptiness of both? The existence of that instinct has been perpetually exposed by miserable attempts to satisfy its demands with outside show and splendid impositions. The French cannot even go to work, under their present republic, as we do in America. The common-sense of our people teaches them that a republican government is a mere matter of business, which must make no pretences to splendour; and hence, the constitution once settled, the president is elected and sworn-in with no nonsense or parade; and Mr Cincinnatus Polk sits down in the White House, and sends every man about his business. A young country has as yet but the instincts of infancy; there is as yet nothing to satisfy but the craving for nourishment, and the demand for large room. But it is not so where nations are full-grown. Can a maid forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Can France forget that she had once a court and a throne that dazzled the world? No! says every craftsman of the revolution; and therefore our republic, too, must be splendid and imperial! So, instead of going to work as if their new constitution were a reality, there must be a fÈte of inauguration. In the same conviction, Napoleon is nominated for the presidency, because he has a name; and he immediately withdraws from vulgar eyes, to keep his "presence like a robe pontifical," against the investiture. Oh, for some Yankee farmer to look on and laugh! It would not take him long to calculate the end of such a republic. Jonathan can understand a queen, and would stare at a coronation in sober earnest, convinced that it had a meaning—at least, in England! But a republic of kettle-drums and trumpets will never do with him; and if he were favoured with an interview with the pompous aspirant to the French presidency, it would probably end in his telling Louis Napoleon the homely truth—that he has nothing to be proud of, and had better eat and drink like other folk, and "define his position" as a candidate, if he don't want to find himself used-up, and sent on a long voyage up Salt River; which, you may not know, my Basil, is a Stygian stream, and the ancients called it Lethe. So much, then, for the ultima ratio of illegitimate governments—the attempt to satisfy the demand for national dignity by pageants and by names, and to drown the outcries of natural discontent by the sounding of brass and the tinkling of cymbals.

In vain did the sage Piedmontese foretell it all, like a Cassandra. "Man is prohibited," said that admirable Mentor, "from giving great names to things of which he is the author, and which he thinks great; but if he has proceeded legitimately, the vulgar names of things will be rendered illustrious, and become grand." How specially does England answer to the latter half of this maxim! and who can read the former without seeing France, in her fool's-cap, before his mental eye? De Maistre himself has instanced the revolutionary follies of Paris, and lashed them with unsparing severity. Whatever is national in England seems to have grown up, like her oaks, from deep and strong roots, and to stand, like them, immovable, They make their own associations, and dignify their own names. Everything is home-born, natural, and real. The Garter, the Wool-sack, Hyde Park, Epsom and Ascot—these things in France would be the Legion of Honour, the Curule-chair, the Elysian fields, the Olympic games! The veritable attempt was made to reinstitute, in the Champ-de-Mars, the sports of antiquity; and they received the pompous name of Les jeux Olympiques. De Maistre ridicules their nothingness, and adds that, when he saw a building erected and called the OdÉon, he was sure that music was in its decline, and that the place would shortly be to let. In like manner, he says of the motto of Rousseau, with intense naÏvete, "Does any man dare to write under his own portrait, vitam impendere vero? You may wager, without further information, fearlessly, that it is the likeness of a liar." How quick the human heart perceives what is thus put into words by a philosopher! It is in vain for France to think of covering her nakedness with a showy veil. The Empire was a glittering gauze, but how transparent! They saw one called Emperor and a second Charlemagne; and the Pope himself was there to give him a crown. But it was a meagre cheat. Poor Josephine never looked ridiculous before, but then she acted nonsense. The imperial robes were gorgeous, but they meant nothing on the Citizen Buonaparte. Everybody saw behind the scenes. They detected Talma in the strut of Napoleon; they pointed at the wires that moved the hands and eyes of the Pope. All stage-effect, machinery, and pasteboard. The imperial court was all what children call make-believe: it vanished like the sport of children.

The great feast of fraternity, last spring, was, on de Maistre's principles, the natural harbinger of that fraternal massacre in June; and the ineffectual attempt to be festive over the late inauguration of the constitution, has but one redeeming feature to prevent a corresponding augury of disaster. Its miserable failure makes it possible that the constitution will survive its anniversary. Then there will be a demonstration, at any rate, and then the thing will be superannuated. Since 1790, there has been no end to such glorifications; each chased and huzza'd, in turn, by a nation of full-grown children, and all hollow and transient as bubbles. Perpetual beginnings, every one warranted to be no failure this time, and each going out in a stench. What continual Champs-de-Mars and Champs-de-Mai! what wavings of new flags, and scattering of fresh flowers! and all ending in confessed failure, and beginning the same thing over again! "Nothing great has great beginnings"—says Mentor again. "History shows no exception to this rule. Crescit occulto velut arbor Ævo,—this is the immortal device of every great institution."

Legitimacy never makes such mistakes, except when permitted by God, to accomplish its own temporary abasement. It needs not to support itself by tricks and shams. It has a creative power which dignifies everything it touches; which often turns its own occasions into festivals, but makes no festivals on purpose to dignify itself. When Henry V. is crowned at Rheims, or at Notre-Dame, he will not send over the Alps for Pio Nono, nor consult Savans to learn how CÆsar should be attired that day. That youth may safely dispense with all superfluous pageantry, for he is not new Charlemagne, but old Charlemagne. The blood of the Carlovingians has come down to him from Isabella of Hainault, through St Louis and Henry IV. Chateaubriand should not have forgotten this, when (speaking of this prince's unfortunate father, the Duke de Berry) he enthusiastically sketched a thousand years of Capetian glory, and cried—"He bien! la revolution a livrÉ tout cela au couteau de Louvel." Another revolution has thus far relegated the same substantial dignity to exile and obscurity, as if France could afford to lose its past, and begin again, as an infant of days. But besides the evident tendency of things to reaction, there is something about the legitimate king of France which looks like destiny. He was announced to the kingdom by the dying lips of his murdered sire, while yet unborn, as if the fate of empire depended on his birth. MÉnagez-vous, pour l'enfant que vous portez dans votre sein," said the unhappy man to his duchess, and the group of bystanders was startled! It was the first that France heard of Henry the Fifth, and it seemed to inspire Chateaubriand with the spirit of prophecy, and he eloquently remarks upon it as a derniÈre espÉrance. "The dying prince," he says, "seemed to bear with him a whole monarchy, and at the same moment to announce another. Oh God! and is our salvation to spring out of our ruin? Has the cruel death of a son of France been ordained in anger, or in mercy? is it a final restoration of the legitimate throne, or the downfall of the empire of Clovis?" This grand question now hangs in suspense: but, as I said, Chateaubriand must have taken courage before he died, and inwardly answered it favourably. That great writer seems to have felt beforehand, for his countrymen, the loyalty to which they will probably return. To the prince he stood as a sort of sponsor for the future. When the royal babe was baptised, he presented water from the Jordan, in which the last hope of legitimacy received the name of Dieu-donnÉ: when Charles the Tenth was dethroned, he stood up for the young king, and consented to fall with his exclusion; and the last years of France's greatest genius were a consistent confessorship for that legitimacy with which he believed the prosperity of his country indissolubly bound. Now, I should like to ask a French republican—if I could find a sane one,—what would you wish to do with Henry of Bordeaux? Would you wish this heir of your old histories to renounce his birth-right, declare legitimacy an imposition, and undertake to settle down in Paris as one of the people? Why not, if you are all republicans, and see no more in a prince than in a gamin? Why should not this Henry Capet throw up his cap for the constitution, and stick up a tradesman's sign in the Place de la Revolution, as "Henry Capet, parfumeur?" Why not let him hire a shop in the lower stories of the Palais Royal and teach the Parisians better manners than to cut off his head, by devoting himself to shaving their beards? Everybody knows the reason why not; and that reason shows the reality of legitimacy. Night and day such a shop would be mobbed by friends and foes alike. Go where he might, the parfumeur would be pointed at by fingers, and aimed at by lorgnettes, and bored to death by a rabble of starers, who would insist upon it that he was the hereditary lord of France. Mankind cannot free themselves from such impressions, and, what is more conclusive, princes cannot free themselves from the impressions of mankind, or undertake to live like other men, as if history and genealogy were not facts. For weal or for woe, they are as unchangeable as the leopard with his spots. Let Henry Capet come to America, and try to be a republican with us. Our very wild-cats would assert their inalienable right to "look at a king," and he would certainly be torn to pieces by good-natured curiosity.

It is curious to see the natural instinct amusing itself, for the present, with such a mere nominis umbra as Louis Napoleon. In some way or other the hereditary prestige must be created; nothing less is satisfactory, and the "imperial fetishism" will answer very well till something more substantial is found necessary. Richard Cromwell was necessary to Charles II., and so is Louis Napoleon to Henry V. Napoleon still seems capable of giving France a dynasty; this possibility will be soon extinguished by the incapability of his representative. Louis will reign long enough to exhibit that recompense to Josephine, in the person of her grandson, which heaven delights to allot to a repudiated wife; and then, for his own sake, he will be called coquin and poltron. Napoleon will take his historical position as an individual, having no remaining hold on France; and the imperial fetishism will be ignominiously extinguished. Richard Cromwell made a very decent old English gentleman, and Louis Napoleon may perhaps end his days as respectably, in some out-of-the-way corner of Corsica. Let me again quote the French Mentor. He says, "There never has existed a royal family to whom a plebeian origin could be assigned. Men may say, if Richard Cromwell had possessed the genius of his father, he would have fixed the protectorate in his family; which is precisely the same thing as to say—if this family had not ceased to reign, it would reign still." Here is the formula that will suit the case of Louis Napoleon; but future historians will moralise upon the manner in which Napoleon himself worked out his own destruction. For the sake of a dynasty, he puts away poor Josephine. The King of Rome is born to him, but his throne is taken. The royal youth perishes in early manhood, and men find Napoleon's only representative in the issue of the repudiated wife. Her grandson comes to power, and holds it long enough to make men say—how much better it might have been with Napoleon had he kept his faith to Josephine, and contentedly taken as his heir the child in whom Providence has revealed at last his only chance of continuing his family on a throne! It makes one thing of Scripture, "Yet ye say wherefore? because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously; ... therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth, for the Lord, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away."

A traveller from the south of France says that he saw everywhere the portrait of Henry V. Besides the mysterious hold which legitimacy keeps upon the vulgar and the polite alike, there are associations with it which operate on all classes of men. Tradesmen and manufacturers are for legitimacy, because they love peace, and want to make money. The roturiers sooner or later learn the misery of mobs, and the love of change makes them willing to welcome home the king, especially as they mistake their own hearts, and flatter themselves that their sudden loyalty is proof of remaining virtue. Then the profligate and abandoned, they want a monarchy, in hopes of another riot in the palace. It may be doubted whether the blouses can be permanently contented without a king to curse. The national anthem cannot be sung with any spirit, unless there be a monarch who can be imagined to hear all its imprecations against tyrants: in fact, the king must come back, if only to make sense of the Marseilles Hymn.

What imaginable sense is there in singing these red-hot verses at a feast of fraternity, and in honour of the full possession of absolute liberty? Then, where is the sport of clubs, and the excitement of conspiracies, if there's no king to execrate within locked doors? Is Paris to have no more of those nice little Émeutes? What's to be done with the genius that delights in infernal machines? Who's to be fired at in a glass coach? Everybody knows that Cavaignacs and Lamartines are small game for such sport. Your true assassin must have, at least, a duke of the blood. These are considerations which must have their weight in deciding upon probabilities; though, for one, I am not sure but France is doomed, by retributive justice, to be thus the Tantalus of nations, steeped to the neck in liberty, but forbidden to drink, with kings hanging over them to provoke the eye, and yet escaping the hand.

In 1796 de Maistre published his ConsidÉrations sur la France. They deserve to be reproduced for the present age. Nothing can surpass the cool contempt of the philosophical rÉactionnaire, or the confidence with which, from his knowledge of the past, he pronounces oracles for the future. Do you ask how Henry V. is to recover his rights? In ten thousand imaginable ways. See what Cavaignac might have done last July, had the time been ripe for another Monk! There's but one way to keep legitimacy out; it comes in as water enters a leaky ship, oozing through seams, and gushing through cracks, where nobody dreamed of such a thing. As long as even a tolerable pretender survives, a popular government must be kept in perpetual alarm. But you shall hear the Count, my Basil! Let me give you a free translation.

"In speculating about counter-revolutions, we often fall into the mistake of taking it for granted that such reactions can only be the result of popular deliberation. The people won't allow it, it is said; they will never consent; it is against the popular feeling. Ah! is it possible? The people just go for nothing in such affairs; at most they are a passive instrument. Four or five persons may give France a king. It shall be announced to the provinces that the king is restored: up go their hats, and vive le roi! Even in Paris, the inhabitants, save a score or so, shall know nothing of it till they wake up some morning and learn that they have a king. 'Est-il possible?' will be the cry: 'how very singular! What street will he pass through? Let's engage a window in good time, there'll be such a horrid crowd!' I tell you the people will have nothing more to do with re-establishing the monarchy, than they have had in establishing the revolutionary government!... At the first blush one would say, undoubtedly, that the previous consent of the French is necessary to the restoration; but nothing is more absurd. Come, we'll crop theory, and imagine certain facts.

"A courier passes through Bordeaux, Nantes, Lyons, and so en route, telling everybody that the king is proclaimed at Paris; that a certain party has seized the reins, and has declared that it holds the government only in the king's name, having despatched an express for his majesty, who is expected every minute, and that every one mounts the white cockade. Rumour catches up the story, and adds a thousand imposing details. What next? To give the republic the fairest chance, let us suppose it to have the favour of a majority, and to be defended by republican troops. At first these troops shall bluster very loudly; but dinner-time will come; the fellows must eat, and away goes their fidelity to a cause that no longer promises rations, to say nothing of pay. Then your discontented captains and lieutenants, knowing that they have nothing to lose, begin to consider how easily they can make something of themselves, by being the first to set up Vive-le-roi! Each one begins to draw his own portrait, most bewitchingly coloured; looking down in scorn on the republican officers who so lately knocked him about with contempt; his breast blazing with decorations, and his name displayed as that of an officer of His Most Christian Majesty! Ideas so single and natural will work in the brains of such a class of persons: they all think them over; every one knows what his neighbour thinks, and they all eye one another suspiciously. Fear and distrust follow first, and then jealousy and coolness. The common soldier, no longer inspired by his commander, is still more discouraged; and, as if by witchcraft, the bonds of discipline all at once receive an incomprehensible blow, and are instantly dissolved. One begins to hope for the speedy arrival of his majesty's paymaster; another takes the favourable opportunity to desert and see his wife. There's no head, no tail, and no more any such thing as trying to hold together.

"The affair takes another turn with the populace. They push about hither and thither, knocking one another out of breath, and asking all sorts of questions; no one knows what he wants; hours are wasted in hesitation, and every minute does the business. Daring is everywhere confronted by caution; the old man lacks decision, the lad spoils all by indiscretion; and the case stands thus,—one may get into trouble by resisting, but he that keeps quiet may be rewarded, and will certainly get off without damage. As for making a demonstration—where is the means? Who are the leaders? Whom can ye trust? There's no danger in keeping still; the least motion may get one into trouble. Next day comes news—such a town has opened its gates. Another inducement to hold back! Soon this news turns out to be a lie; but it has been believed long enough to determine two other towns, who, supposing that they only follow such example, present themselves at the gates of the first town to offer their submission. This town had never dreamed of such a thing; but, seeing such an example, resolves to fall in with it. Soon it flies about that Monsieur the mayor has presented to his majesty the keys of his good city of Quelquechose, and was the first officer who had the honour to receive him within a garrison of his kingdom. His Majesty—of course—made him a marshal of France on the spot. Oh! enviable brevet! an immortal name, and a scutcheon everlastingly blooming with fleurs-de-lis! The royalist tide fills up every moment, and soon carries all before it. Vive-le-roi! shouts out long-smothered loyalty, overwhelmed with transports: Vive-le-roi! chokes out hypocritical democracy, frantic with terror. No matter! there's but one cry; and his Majesty is crowned, and has all the royal makings of a king. This is the way counter-revolutions come about. God having reserved to himself the formation of sovereignties, lets us learn the fact, from observing that He never commits to the multitude the choice of its masters. He only employs them, in those grand movements which decide the fate of empires, as passive instruments. Never do they get what they want: they always take; they never choose. There is, if one may so speak, an artifice of Providence, by which the means which a people take to gain a certain object, are precisely those which Providence employs to put it from them. Thus, thinking to abase the aristocracy by hurrahing for CÆsar, the Romans got themselves masters. It is just so with all popular insurrections. In the French revolution the people have been perpetually handcuffed, outraged, betrayed, and torn to pieces by factions; and factions themselves, at the mercy of each other, have only risen to take their turn in being dashed to atoms. To know in what the revolution will probably end, find first in what points all the revolutionary factions are agreed. Do they unite in hating Christianity and monarchy? Very well! The end will be, that both will be the more firmly established in the earth."

Cool, certainly; is it not, my Basil? The legitimists are the only Frenchmen who can keep cool, and bide their time. Chateaubriand has observed, in the same spirit, that there is a hidden power which often makes war with powers that are visible, and that a secret government was always following close upon the heels of the public governments that succeeded each other between the murder of Louis XVI. and the restoration of the Bourbons. This hidden power he calls the eternal reason of things; the justice of God, which interferes in human affairs just in proportion as men endeavour to banish and drive it from them. It is evident that the whole force of de Maistre's prophecy was owing to his religious confidence in this divine interference. He wrote in 1796. That year the career of Napoleon began at Montenotte; and, for eighteen years succeeding, every day seemed to make it less and less probable that his predictions could be verified. The Bourbon star was lost in the sun of Austerlitz. The Republic itself was forgotten; the Pope inaugurated the Empire; Austria gave him a princess, to be the mould of a dynasty, and the source of a new legitimacy. France was peopled with a generation that never knew the Bourbons, and which was dazzled with the genius of Napoleon, and the splendour of his imperial government. But the time came for this puissance occulte, cette justice du ciel! When the Allies entered Paris in 1814, it was suggested to Napoleon that the Bourbons would be restored; and, with all his sagacity, he made the very mistake which de Maistre had foreshown, and said, in almost his very words—"Never! nine-tenths of the people are irreconcilably against it!" One can almost hear what might have been the Count's reply—"Quelle pitiÉ! le peuple n'est pour rien dans les revolutions. Quatre ou cinq personnes, peut-Être, donneront un roi À la France." What could Talleyrand tell about that? The facts were, that in four days the Bourbons were all the rage! The Place VendÔme could hardly hold the mob that raved about Napoleon's statue; and, with ropes and pulleys, they were straining every sinew to drag it to the ground, when it was taken under the protection of Alexander![14] What next? In terror for his very life, this Napoleon flies to Frejus, now sneaking out of a back-window, and now riding post, as a common courier, actually saving himself by wearing the white cockade over his raging breast, and all the time cursing his dear French to Tartarus! A British vessel gives him his only asylum, and the salute he receives from a generous enemy is all that reminds him what he once had been in France. Meantime these detested Bourbons are welcomed home again, with De Maistre's own varieties of Vive-le-roi! The Duke d'Angouleme, advancing to the capital, sees the silver lilies dancing above the spires of Bordeaux: the Count d'Artois hails the same tokens at Nancy: not captains and lieutenants, but generals and marshals, rush to receive His Most Christian Majesty; and the successor of the butchered Louis XVI. comes to his palace, after an exile of twenty years, with the title of Louis the Desired! Nor are subsequent events anything more than the swinging of a pendulum, which must eventually subside into a plummet. If the first disaster of Napoleon, in the fulness of his strength, could make France welcome her legitimacy in 1814, why should not the imbecility of the mere shadow of his name produce a stronger revulsion before this century gains its meridian? There is a residuary fulfilment of de Maistre's augury, which remains to the Bourbons, when all of Napoleon that survives has found its ignominious extinction. Then will the ripe fruit fall into the lap of one who, if he is wise, will make the French forget his kindred with the fourteenth and fifteenth Louises, and remember only that Henry of Bordeaux has before him the example of Henry of Navarre.

There is, indeed, another conceivable end. C'est l'arrÊt que le ciel prononce enfin contre les peuples sans jugement, et rebelles À l'expÉrience.[15] If France does not soon come back to reason, we shall be forced to think her given up of God, to become such a country as Germany, or perhaps as miserable as Spain. But we must not be too hasty in coming to conclusions so deplorable. Let the republic have its day. It will work its own cure; for the chastisement of France must be the curse of ancient Judah. "The people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and everyone by his neighbour; the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable." For the mob of Paris, who got drunk with riot, and must grow sober with headache; for the blousemen and the boys who have pulled a house upon their head, and now maul each other in painful efforts to get from under the ruins; and for the miserable philosophes who see, in the charming state of their country, the fruit of their own atheistic theories; for all these it is but retribution. They needed government; they resolved on license: God has sent them despotism in its worst form. One pities Paris, but feels that it is just. My emotions are very different when I think of what were once "the pleasant villages of France." Miserable campagnards! There are thousands of them, besides the poor souls starving in provincial towns, who curse the republic in their hearts; and, from Normandy to Provence and Languedoc, there are millions of such Frenchmen, who care nothing for dynasties, or fraternities, or democracy, but only pray the good Lord to give peace in their time, that they may sit under their own vine, and earn and eat their daily bread. For them—may God pity them!—what a life Dame Paris leads them! If, with the simplicity of rustics, they were for a moment disposed to be merry last February—when they heard that thereafter loaves and fishes were to fling themselves upon every table, for the mere pleasure of being devoured—how bitterly the simpletons are undeceived! Their present notions of fraternity and equality they get from hunger and from rags. It is not now in France as in the days of Henry IV., when every peasant had a pullet in the pot for his Sunday dinner. That was despotism. It is liberty now—liberty to starve. There is no more oppression, for the very looms refuse to work, and water-wheels stand still; and the vines go gadding and unpruned, and the grape disdains to be trampled in the wine-vat. Yes—and the old paysan and his sprightly dame, who used to drive dull care away in the sunshine—she, with her shaking foot and head, and he with his fiddle and his bow, they have liberty to the full; for their seven sons, who were earning food for them in the sweat of their brow, have come home to the old cabin, ragged and unpaid; and they lounge about in hungry idleness, longing for war, but only because war would provide them with a biscuit or a bullet. What care they for glory, or for constitutions? They ask for bread, and their teeth are ground with gravel-stones. Let England look and learn. If she has troubles, let her see how easily troubles may be invested at compound interest, with the certainty of dividends for years to come. Is hard thrift in a kingdom so bad as starvation in a democracy? And whether is it better to wear out honestly, in this work-day world, as good and quiet subjects; or to be thrust out of it, kicking and cursing, behind a barricade of cabs and paving-stones, in the name of equality? These are the common-sense questions, that every English labourer should be made to feel and answer.

It provokes me, Basil, that my letter may be superannuated while it is travelling in the steamer! The changes of democracy are more frequent than the revolutions of a paddle-wheel. Adieu. Yours,

Ernest.