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announcing the accession to the throne of the new king, in a little salon in Verona.

By and by, as a certain fighting captain, whom he afterwards thought it a fine pride to call "M. Bonaparte," was spreading his terrors over a yet larger area, the Doge, who allowed him shelter in his alsatia, began to grow a little uneasy, and with a gross indifference to divine right, hinted to the newly made king that he had best withdraw. So splendid an opportunity was not to be thrown away, and taking care that he had a clear space round him, again he "struck" an attitude.

"I am r-r-ready to depart," he said to the astonished officer; "but, before I go, e-rase from the Gee-olden Book the six names of my family, and give me back the see-word which my ancestor Henry the Fourth gave the republic!" two unmeaning and melodramatic requests which, it is scarcely necessary to add, were not complied with. It would be unreasonable and unjust to the six ancestors to expunge them from that distinguished volume; and to the sword of the great Henry, which would no doubt fetch its price as a valuable relic, he could have no shadow of a title.

No man ever had such opportunities for these attitudes. There seemed to be a sort of Providence in it, which furnished him with decent opportunity. Even on crossing the St. Gothard-when a bullet grazed him -he was not taken by surprise; and in that lonely pass, and with no greater audience than a simple guide, he contrived to "strike" his attitude once more, and delivered this sentiment: "If the ball had passed a single hair's breadth lower, the present Keying of France would be called Charles the Tenth!" Oh, note the atmosphere of foolery these poor souls lived in!

We might call him the Elliston of the Bourbons-Charles Lamb's Elliston. The marriage of the Duc d'Angoulême furnished a fine opportunity for a neat tag. A dismal sort of solemnity it must have been; but when the curtain was about to come down, the "heavy father" was observed to come forward to the footlights, and made the newly married pair this pathetic speech: "If the kee-rown of France was all roses, I would give it to ye cheerfully; but as it is all thorns, I keep it for myself!" A richly comic scene, which must have amused such

English spectators as were present, and suggests Mr. Elliston in the mock procession and mock coronation robes, lifting up his hands and giving the pit his benediction: "Bless ye, my people!"

Everybody seemed bent on giving him an opening for a "point." Even that far-seeing "M. Bonaparte " forgot these dramatic propensities of his, and was so injudicious as to convey to him a proposal to dispose of his royal rights in petto. There was an opportunity not likely to recur again; so he gets out his old royal furniture and decorations, fits on his gold paper crown, and begins his stamping and striding: not alone for M. Bonaparte, but for the sovereigns generally, who will receive their letters by the next post, and draw weary sighs over the closely written Bourbon writing. It was a mistake, a sad blunder of M. Bonaparte's. He should have been wiser: and, curious to say, the acting on this occasion was decent and classical, and not nearly so exaggerated as usual; for he declined the offer with a certain dignity, and said that he was conscious how much "M. Bonaparte" had done for the good and glory of France. But at the same time-here the minor actor, too long restrained, broke out—he was THE SON OF SAINT LOUIS! and he might be allowed, with a certain appropriateness, to give them the well-known sentiment, TOUT EST PERDU FORS L'HONNEUR! It was considered among the Bourbon followers, that this neat "tag" utterly extinguished the "Corsican upstart." No doubt, he never raised his head afterwards, and the train of subsequent reverses might reasonably be attributed to that fatal thunderbolt.

On a later occasion he played with a suitable dignity, but still when it was so easy to play with dignity that he deserves no uncommon credit. On the news of that wholesale freezing out at Moscow being brought in, and every true British heart being frantic with joy at "the low Corsican upstart" being thus exterminated wholesale by the mere force of the elements, the lord mayor and corporation of the city of London determined to celebrate the event with more than usual festivity; and, with the questionable taste which seasons the proceedings of that body, sent an invitation to M. Louis Capet at Hartwell, praying him to come and drink pottle-deep to the confusion of those

who had been frozen, en masse, like frogs in my Lord the Duke of Penthièvre's Regi

a pond. M. Louis Capet the Eighteenth sent back a firm but respectful reply, declining such indecent rioting over the confusion of his countrymen, not his enemies. And yet, by and by, in compensation as it were, must burst forth the old element, spoiling all; for we find him with that eternal pen of his in hand, writing to the Emperor of all the Russias, and entreating, with an infinite burlesque, grace, and consideration, for the French prisoners "my children" (mes enfans)! How the autocrat must have smiled over the comic notion.

ment, Gentleman of his Highness, Fellow of the Academies of Madrid, Lyons," etc. High by, on the same shelf lies a Royal Army List,, which though dated '89, must have been for the preceding year; and here we cannot find M. Florian's name among the lower grades of the Penthièvre Dragoons. The conclusion is, that M. Florian must have been plunged abruptly into the rank of captainship, without probation in the lower degrees: a precious, because unconscious, bit of testimony to the rotten organization of all things in this fatal year of break up. It is hard not to suspect our illustrious subject of playing a little mild Egalité game, coquetting as he was with the "strong spirits," and writing cold letters of advice to the unlucky king. He was known to have prophesied some sort of moral earthquakes. There was that scene of his going to register the edict, after what was comically termed a Bed of Justice, and when his coach got surrounded with an excited mob, who were hampering the horses and blocking up the street. My Lord "Sir" is presently seen, thrusting itself

dow to address the coachman. All the mob round him hear him say in a clear ringing voice, "TAKE CARE TO HURT NO ONE!" Shout, as of course from mob, for tenderhearted prince, who is escorted home in tempest of vivas! This may be a hard construing of a simple well-meant action; but yet the exhibition of that prominent royal torso at the window, suggests irresistibly a bit of the old theatrical manner. The temptation of " striking an attitude" before such an audience, even on the disadvantageous boards of four wheels, was not to be resisted.

Though our popular idea of him is that fat, rolling, good-natured, mulish, dull, wrong-necked order, which is the hereditary Bourbon type, there were points of exception in him, not quite so harmless. From being a looker-on all his life, a lounger at the windows with his arms on the balustrade of the balcony looking down in security at what was going on below, he had become a cautious, knowing Bourbon, almost crafty. We have our suspicions of him from the very beginning, from those days when-having a forecasting of the revolutionary business-well and conspicuously out of the coach winhe kept himself in a sort of neutrality. We hear of him shut up carefully in his little apartments whence he scribbled his epigrams, or what he called his epigrams, for they are mostly of a very poor quality. He was lying in wait, as it were, fearful of committing himself, and we may suspect, was playing a little Egalité game of his own. As he looked on, he had little quiet pastimes of his own. He sent out satirical pamphlets, which are not at all satirical. He wrote an opera called the Caravan. There were numerous institutions which bore his name, "Monsieur." There was, "Sir's " theatre: "Sir's " journal; and "Sir's" printing press, where no doubt were printed his own lucubrations. On this very desk lies a copy of Florian's Estelle, that elegant screed of namby-pamby, which has been printed at "Sir's" press and the typography is, in the language of the curious, exquisite. The lighter strokes of the letters are fine as hairs, and the whole effect is clear, clean, sharp, and brilliant. On both sides of the binding, flames out the fleur-de-lis. On the title-page, dated 1788, we read M. Florian's military apotheosis, "Captain of Dragoons, in his Highness',

"Never, never shall I desert the king!" did he assure the great breechless, who were unquiet and afraid he was about stealing off like the other emigrants. Not a month after, when the unwieldy berline was rumbling along the paved road to Varennes, my lord the "Sir" was skulking along in disguise, presenting at the various posts an old frayed, well-worn passport, filled in with the name of "Michael Forster," which he had picked up somehow. It fared better with the sham Michael Forster than with the courier of the sham Baroness Korff. Who was the real Michael Forster? The sham Forster was

certainly true to the letter of his promise to the mob; he did not desert the king, for he fled with him.

the arrangement was a little lawless in its origin, we would all be spared much travelling. The laquais de place of Rome, and Venice, and Florence, would be sadly out of work and would retire from business. At book auctions is now and then offered a superb work known as the Musée Français: a series of costly plates, exhibiting as French property the "Transfiguration" stolen from the Vatican, and other matchless treasures.

For a man with so dramatic a turn of mind, the incidents of that splendid restoration to Paris in 1814, must have been singularly gratifying. Never were such gorgeous scenery, appointments, and decorations. All the costumes, too, of the genuine sort, and worn by real supernumeraries belonging to the country they purposed to represent. I think it is pardonable in Frenchmen "The army" of William Tell was but a poor never to forget the bitter personal mortificathing to this exhibition. All eye-witnesses tions to which that return of the Bourbons who had rushed over in flocks, were dazzled exposed them. It almost amounts to an inand bewildered. Emperors, kings, and dividual degradation. Some one has deprinces, were to be seen in thick groups. scribed his walking abroad in the morning They were cheap in those days. Everybody across the gay Place du Carrousel, and seehas read and heard of, and perhaps seen, too, ing men with windlasses and tackle busy that gorgeous kaleidoscope, which kept turn-slinging the glorious Venetian horses, their ing and turning for many days, showing gilding resplendent in the sun, down upon Russians, Poles, Cossacks of the Don, Tar- wagons, to be packed in great cases, and tars, Germans, English, Belgians, all blended marked we may suppose, "VENICE-Rein a dazzling mass of color. What a thea- turned Goods." What rage in the roused tre, too, for such a spectacle-no other than bystanders as they witnessed this direct afthat gay city of Paris! The Russians pick- front! Of another morning, an English lady eted in the Elysium fields-the Cossacks, -so she has told the writer of these short with their long spears, cantering through the notes-enters the grand galleries of the LouPlace Vendôme-the rude Blucher, eager for vre, full of the gayety of those gay times, to general sack and blowing up of bridges see the wonderful treasures; by and by, as these things are all familiar to us. There she is sitting, resting after her fatigues of are large colored prints to be seen, crowded peripatetic picture-gazing, she hears a heavy with figures, representing "The Entry of the tramp afar off, and gradually drawing nearer. Allied Sovereigns into Paris!" when every Then, enters a dark mass of soldiery, marchLegitimist heart was made glad. With all ing four deep, which spreads itself out in a these accessories, we may be sure the huge long line, long as the gallery itself-the Engcentre figure-now, alack, a very obese Bour-lish Rifle Brigade, with the familiar buglebon, and an abdominal personification of horn on their caps. "Halt!" (in the EngDivine right-was not slack in availing himself of the opportunity, and struck "attitudes " for the "Allied Sovereigns" all day long.

There is one thing we can never forgive that bevy of sovereigns-that ruthless stripping of the city of all those cosmopolitan treasures of art which had been stripped from other cities. What a Vatican had Paris the Beautiful been now, with all that plunder! And yet had the "Corsican upstart" but conducted himself decently at Elba, it was signed, sealed, and agreed that the French were to keep all these famous spoils. We who go down to the sea in ships, in the mailboats of the South-Eastern, need have journeyed on no farther. Everything would have been focused satisfactorily; and though

lish tongue), and the muskets presently fall on the smooth oaken parquet. Enter then, men with ladders and hammers; and the business of taking down the "Transfiguration" and the other noble picture sets in. Not without silent protest in the shape of most mournful scowls and clenching of teeth, floods of hatred and disgust, at the stolid Saxon invaders.

In the life of that "Corsican upstart," as it was part of the true British political religion to call him, were many dazzling days and nights, which in his last dismal prison, it must have been some consolation for him to dwell on. But there was none colored with a more delicious fascination than that night of his restoration, when, very late, he stood at the foot of the Tuileries staircase,

and, in a blaze of light, old familiar faces M. Guizot's stony and coldly classical mepoured down to meet him; and there were moirs. Who cares for that aping of the tears and smiles, and intoxicating joy. No English Government-that sham ministry wonder that he held that, to be the happiest and sham opposition, with the doctrinaires day of his life. In the midst of the scene, and the rest of the jargon? In the midst of some bright lady found her foot strike against all we still have the fat figure, with the coatsomething rough upon the carpet, and look-tails held up, gorging itself on rich dishes, ing curiously, discovered it to be a yellow and staying its stomach between the courses fleur-de-lis sewn on over the golden Napo- with "picking little pork chops," dressed in leonic bee. A true sham, fatally typical of a peculiar way. Truly said the rather gay the Bourbon hold on the sympathies of the lady to whom he wrote, chiding her for becountry; and the noble ladies present, with ing more gay than she should be, to this efmuch mirth and laughter, fetch scissors and fect, that the wife of Cæsar should be above rip out every one of those flimsy ornaments. suspicion: "I am not your wife, neither The turbulent spirit of Haydon, weary of have you the slightest resemblance to Cæbearding Academicians, found its way across sar." Very false was the Talleyrand bon to this strange scene. No one has given so mot, coined to order for the Count of Artois : vigorous a picture. He went up, and saw "There is nothing changed in France; there Divine Right going by to chapel, with the is only one Frenchman more "-paraphrased newly converted Marshals Augereau and bitterly by the wags of the day, when all the Marmont holding up his coat-tails. "As world was going to see that distinguished they lifted up his coat," says this fine noble stranger the giraffe, newly arrived at his nature—always in protest against baseness lodgings in the Zoological Gardens: "There of any sort―" I felt scorn to see human be- is nothing changed in France; there is only ing so degraded." He went to the theatre one beast more." So he goes on to the end, where they were giving Hamlet, and at par- picking his pork chops daintily in his fingers ticular passages saw the whole pit start to between the courses, and with the renegades their feet, and shriek furiously, "Bravo! holding up his coat-tails. From the fat bravo! Down with the English! Down mouth proceed at times feeble puns, and with the English!" Mr. Raikes, the well- when the last hour of the Last Lewis has known man about town, was there at about arrived, he passes away with a calembour. the same time, and at the theatre at Compiègne, where they were playing Vive Henri Quatre, and other popular tunes.

After all, it is not so much a man or a The world is very familiar with the heavy race, this odious Bourbonism, as a kind of vengeance taken by the followers of this false spirit or faith. There are hints of it in most Christian king on their enemies, the other countries. Wherever there is an oldlegalized shooting down of brave soldiers, fashioned, immovable mulishness, that is and the organized destruction of hunted out- cruel and pitiless, that will listen to no adcasts by Royalists. We walk down the Lux-vice, that sticks by old shams and effete embourg gardens among the nursery-maids, forms, there is Bourbonism more or less. and are shown where the bravest of the brave The grand feature of all is, that whatever be was "fusillé." There are ugly associations the cruel teaching, they LEARN NOTHING. with restored Bourbons. Oh, blind, infatu- That biting Talleyrand wrote their epitaph:

ated race!

There is nothing in the world so dreary as the fasti of this reign. It may all be read in

THEY HAVE LEARNT NOTHING FORGOTTEN

NOTHING. This is the moral to be drawn from the story of THE LAST LEWISES.

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POETRY.-Col. Mulligan's Child, 434. Waiting, 434. Earl Russell, 434. Things Hoped for, 466. Our Country's Call, 467. Socks and Verse, 467. Winfield Scott, 471. The North and the South, by Mrs. Browning, 480. The French Princes, 480.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Disunion of America-English Hope of our National Destruction, 471. Mudie's Library, 471. Parson Brownlow, 476. Epigram, 476. The Adopted Birds, 479. M. de Lamartine's Letter, 479.

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