The answer of Queen Victoria, which | concessions. He had appointed Marshal Palmerston describes in one of his des- Bugeaud to the military command of patches as "a tickler," is worth transcribing:

Paris, and Lamartine admits that this soldier, the conqueror of Algeria, a man Osborne, September 10, 1846. of powerful mind, and one who possessed MADAME, I have just received the confidence of the troops, at the head your Majesty's letter of the 8th of this month, and I of the army of Paris, would have rendered hasten to thank you for it. You will probably the victory of the people either impossiremember what passed at Eu between the ble or bloody; but Guizot was dismissed, king and myself. You know the importance and M. Thiers, at the very moment the I have always attached to the maintenance of marshal had mounted his horse to give our cordial understanding, and the zeal with battle to the insurgents, and there is little which I have worked for it. You have doubt-doubt but that he would have crushed less learned that we refused to arrange the them, deprived him of his command. marriage between the queen of Spain and our cousin Leopold (which both queens greatly desired), as we did not wish to withdraw from an arrangement which would be more agreeable to your king, although we did not consider that course to be the better. You will therefore easily understand that the sudden announcement of this double marriage could but occasion us surprise and much regret. I must ask your pardon for speaking of politics at this time, but I love to be able to say that I have always been sincere towards you. In praying you to present my homage to the king, Í am, madame,

Your Majesty's ever devoted friend and sister,

VICTORIA R.*

And so miserable old Mephistopheles trembled and vacillated between this minister and that, until King Mob decided the matter by driving him out of his palace and his ill-gotten kingdom. Guizot left the Tuileries before his master; as he was issuing from a private gate, some people recognized him, and fired upon him. He was compelled to retrace his steps and take shelter in a part of the Louvre occupied by some staff-officers. Through the open windows he could descry the occupation of the Carrousel by the populace, the defection of the National Guards, the passive

of the generals, the flight of the whole royal family on foot. He was afterwards sheltered by the Duc de Broglie, but endured the most painful uneasiness on account of the safety of his mother and children, who were hiding in another part of Paris in a house to which there was no way of gaining access, situated as it was in the very heart of the insurrection.

Nemesis, however, was close upon theness of the troops, the ineffectual efforts heels of king and minister. France had long been echoing with cries for reform, for an extension of the suffrage. But neither king nor minister foresaw the end; neither, confiding in their citizen soldiers, dreamed of the possibility of a successful rebellion. Even while the former was chuckling over the suppression of the banquets and the consequent, as he imagined, dissipation of the danger, there entered a messenger to tell In a few days he succeeded in making him that bands of armed men were gath-his escape into Belgium, disguised as a ering in the streets. As the émeute as-livery servant. The unseasonable puncsumed more formidable proportions, a tilios of his supposed master, who would cowardly terror seized upon the royal not allow him to carry the luggage, once family. The queen implored, almost or twice laid him open to suspicion. He commanded, Guizot to resign; her hus- succeeded in reaching England, however, band was weak enough to permit this; where a few days afterwards he was and the minister was too proud to ex-joined by his children and his mother. postulate. Now that the king was face to face with the peril he had evoked, he had not the courage to do and dare, but fell into irresolution and imbecility at the very time when immovable firmness was most needed. Had the situation been left to Guizot he might have saved his master's throne. His cool courage and inflexible will would have resorted to no half measures, to no

These letters are extracted from Baron Stockmar's

Memoirs," vol. ii. pp. 181-3.

But the terrors and the fatigue she had undergone proved fatal to that noble woman; she expired fifteen days afterwards, as much the victim of the third revolution as her husband had been of the first.

He resided for a twelvemonth in a house in Pelham Crescent, Brompton, which was afterwards, by a strange irony of fortune, inhabited by Ledru Rollin during his exile. The Republic commenced a prosecution against him in his absence; but it came to nothing. Early

in 1849 he published a kind of circular entitled "Guizot à ses Amis," in which he proffered his services to the electors of France; but they did not avail themselves of the offer. His reception in England, except among those who were sufficiently generous to sink the statesman in the man of letters, was not cordial. His bad faith and duplicity in the affair of the Spanish marriages were as yet too fresh in men's minds.

and 66

aim was to awaken their intelligence rather than to load their memories. Especially when he went back to the formation of the nation and to the legendary times, he endeavoured

not so much to teach them all the facts as to give them an accurate idea of each reign and epoch. In quoting the old chroniclers he translated and commented on them in the style which made him so admirable a storyteller, and while his grandchildren listened his daughters followed him in shorthand.

He died at Val Richer, in Normandy, on the 12th of September, 1874, at the age of eighty-seven, of sheer vital decay.

In November, 1849, he returned to Paris, where he put himself in communication with the heads of the monarchical party. He paid two more visits to EngAs an orator he stood in the very foreland; one in 1850, to his old master, and most rank. In literature his achievea second after the coup d'état of 1851. ments were immense, both in extent and Many years of life were yet reserved to value. As an historian he was patient him, but his public career was finished. and laborious in research, accurate and One by one he heard of the passing impartial in facts. But unfortunately his away of rivals, friends, and foes, and yet hard, dry, unsympathetic style, so devoid he continued in the tranquil enjoyment of brilliancy or ornament, narrows the of a green old age, passed in the pleas- circle of his readers. A Frenchman has ant shades of Val Richer and the delights very happily said that in his writings "he of literary pursuits. The results of this is always the professor: "he is always long retirement have been given to the lecturing. But for this defect he would world in "La Révolution d'Angleterre" have been one of the greatest historians Monk," in "Méditations et Etudes of the modern world. As it is, he has Morales sur la Religion et la Philoso-done a vast deal to extend the taste for phie," "Corneille et son Temps," "Shake-historical studies in France, and his vospeare et son Temps," &c. But the most luminous writings must ever remain important production of his latter days amongst the most valuable literary poswas the "Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire sessions of his country. de mon Temps," in which he traces his poHis merits and demerits as a politician litical career and that of France from his cannot be summed up so easily nor disentry into public life to the revolution of missed so briefly. He was not a great 1848. The work is a calm and dispas- statesman. He possessed great talents, sionate account of events as they hap- but no genius. He could calculate probpened; he enters into no elaborate de-abilities-sometimes, as in '48, his calfence of himself, although he endeavours culations were fatally erroneous to put Louis Phillippe, for whom he en- prepare to meet them; but an unexpecttertained much warmer feelings than ed situation checkmated him; he could those of mere political attachment, in a not rise to it, master it, turn it dexterfavourable light; neither does he ever ously to his advantage. His intellect go beneath the surface of things, or was reflective, but almost devoid of favour us with a view of the springs spontaneity. The memory of that awful which set the puppets moving. Unlike day when his father fell a victim to revChateaubriand or Lamartine, he gives us olutionary cruelty, the memory of his no confidences, tells us nothing of him- mother's anguish -impressions which self beyond what the world knew before. her perpetual mourning never permitted That cold reticent nature was opposed to to fade haunted him through life, until all self-revelation. the dread of anarchy became the key-. note of his whole political career. find the one thought perpetually cropping up in his writings. In one place he says, "Democracy is the spirit in which each of the different classes and the great political parties into which our society is divided cherishes the hope of annihilating the others and of reigning alone." Speaking of Napoleon, he says: "He was endowed with a genius incomparably

A paragraph from the Times of the 9th of October gives us a pleasant patriarchal picture of his last years.

His unfinished work "The History of France, related to my Grandchildren," was not a mere designation, but expressed the actual fact. For several years he was wont to collect his grandchildren at five o'clock every day in his library, where he gave them a simple sketch of their country's history. His

and

We

Let us hear what he himself says of his conduct during the agitation for reform.

We had not in principle any absolute and extension of the right of suffrage and the inpermanent objection to such reforms. The

active and powerful, and much to be ad- gnac and Charles the Tenth; we find him mired for his antipathy to disorder." reforming laws which affected the liberty One of his latest publications was a de- of the press, and establishing a grand fence of the temporal power of the Church scheme for national education; as the of Rome and yet, as that remarkable minister of a solidly-founded constitu"confession of faith," recently published tional government like our own, such in the newspapers fully proves, he was acts would have been duly appreciated; by conviction a staunch Protestant; but but for Frenchmen he moved too slowly, he regarded Catholicism as the champion too cautiously. He doubted their capacof order; and even religious dogma, ity for rational freedom, and while frantiwhich in most minds overrules all, was cally abusing him, they did their best to with him impotent against that consider- prove he was right. His rule was an ation. iron one, but he lived in an age of peculHe was theoretical rather than practi- iar ferment, of wild theories, and subcal. He was a man of systems: he versive socialism, that threatened the would fain have reduced politics to a very existence of society; the spectres science as exact as mathematics. He of anarchy and the guillotine were always narrowed all certainties and probabilities looming in the distance; but while inwithin a fixed boundary, leaving no mar-spiring hate he had not the genius to gin for possibilities. Narrowness was inspire fear, and hate without fear is the crushing fault of his politics. Never, dangerous. perhaps, was minister more unpopular, more distasteful, more antipathetic to the French character. His manner was Puritanical, impassive, and arrogant. "Every one," says Lord Palmerston, "who did not rebel against him became the slave of his imperious nature." In the Cham-compatibility of certain functions with the ber he was overbearing to insolence; † mission of deputy could and ought to be as a diplomatist he was at one time too natural and legitimate in consequence of the obsequious to foreign nations, as in upward movement of society and the increased granting to England the right of search; exercise of political liberty. But at that moat another imprudent and vexatious, as ment these innovations were not in our opinion in risking a war with that country over Not neceseither necessary or well-timed. the Spanish marriages, solely for the ag- proved that by the institutions and the actual sary, because for thirty years past events had grandizement of the Orléans family. laws, liberty and strength had not been wantAnd yet it is difficult, from an English ing to the interference of the country in its point of view, to conceive the hatred he affairs. Not well-timed, because it was likely inspired. He was thoroughly consistent to carry new trials and new difficulties into throughout his career. He never changed, but public opinion advanced and he did not; hence the accusation of inconsistency. From first to last he was the advocate and supporter of constitutional government after the model of the English, and to found such a government in France was the purpose and the failure of his life. We find him defending the principles of the Charter in the teeth of Louis the Eighteenth; we find him resigning office when that king resorted to arbitrary rule; we find him amongst the boldest and foremost opponents of Poli

that which was in our eyes the most real and the most urgent interests of the country, namely, the adaptation and the consolidation of free government, as yet so new amongst us. These were at the same time the cause and the limits of our resistance to the immediate innovations which were demanded of us.

There is much solid reason in this defence. The agitators did not want reform but revolution. The country was weary of the Orleanist rule, its pride was humbled by the peace-at-any-price policy of its government, and had political power been extended it would probably have hastened the fall of the monarchy rather than have saved it. On the other hand, the basis of the narrow representative system was purely bourgeois; all political influence was centred in the middle class, to the partial exclusion of the upper and the total exclusion of the

masses.

How utterly selfish, contemptible, unpatriotic, and unworthy of confi

dence the bourgeois of France are has have imagined the cold austere statesbeen patent to Europe at any time during man capable. Of his inward life he has these thirty years. They have no sym- left us a simple and beautiful confession pathies beyond their shop and their fam- in the opening of his will. He tells us ilies, their poltroonery forces them to be that he has inquired, that he has doubtoverawed by any handful of ruffians who ed; that he has believed the human chooses to raise an émeute. They were mind to be strong enough to solve the among the first to turn against the man problems presented by the universe and who had pampered them, their own citi- man, and that the human will had suffizen king. The extension of the suffrage cient power to rule the life of man accordin the direction of the peasant farmers, a ing to its law and its moral purpose; class monarchical by instinct, might have but that the calm reflection of his old age strengthened the government. But this has brought him back to the simple faith could scarcely have been accomplished of childhood; that he felt himself only a without admitting a corresponding ele- child under the hand of God; that he ment, and a dangerous one, from the believed in God, adored him, without towns. A movement, headed by such seeking to comprehend him, and that he men as Louis Blanc and Ledru Rollin, bowed himself before the mysteries of might well excite the distrust of such a, the Bible and the gospel.

From The Spectator.

MR. GLADSTONE'S "EXPOSTULATION."

minister as Guizot. A man of higher genius might have solved the difficult problem by some bold and daring expedient; but it is difficult to suggest how one of his calibre, and with his dread of democracy, could have acted differently to what he did. In his opposition to the MR. GLADSTONE'S genius is great, but reform banquets he did no more than his it is a little injured by a quality which duty, than any other minister would have rarely belongs to men of genius, and done under similar circumstances; there- seldom strengthens, though it somefore, to hold him responsible for a revo- times serves them, ingenuity. The lution which the agitators had long since "political expostulation" which he has determined upon in the face of every just published contains one or two very concession, is highly illogical. fine sayings; much that it was very nat

The great blots upon his political ural and right, and not a little which it career are joining the factious opposi- was in the highest degree desirable for tion against Molé, and the Spanish mar-him to say; but the effect of these declariages; which proved that selfish ambition and party spleen could overrule in his mind the interests of his country, that he was deficient in true nobility of character and a nice sense of honour, and could descend, if occasion required, into the lowest mire of political degradation at the bidding of his royal master. Marie Amélie is reported to have said of him: "He is a crab with inflexible claws, who fastens upon the rock of power. He will be torn away only with the rock itself."

His egotism was enormous: like Robespierre, he loved to contemplate and worship his own image. One biographer asserts that he had thirty portraits of himself in his bedroom, twenty in his salon, fifteen in his antechamber, and ten in his kitchen!

rations is to some extent diminished by the too great ingenuity of the reasons which he assigns for his expostulation, by the extreme quaintness of the practical object which he proposes to himself in publishing it, by the untenable character of the historical view, on which he seems to take his stand as justifying Parliament's liberal treatment of Roman Catholics, and by the superfluous acrimony of certain expressions, pardonable had they been used in debate, but hardly defensible in a great statesman's carefully written and corrected work, applied by him to a Church which may cease to be altogether, but while it exists, can hardly be otherwise than it is in relation to the characteristics which excite his indigna

tion.

His private life, without being immac- It was perfectly right and even wise ulate, will bear a far stricter scrutiny than for Mr. Gladstone to set forth clearly that of most of his contemporaries. He appears to have been a kind and affectionate husband to both his wives, and the death of the second was felt with a keenness of affliction of which few would

those immense pretensions of the Roman Church which the decrees of the Vatican Council have consolidated and either imposed, or rendered it at any time possible for the Church to impose, as rules

obligatory on the consciences of all her loyal subjects. It was perfectly right and even wise for him to point out how alien such pretensions are to the spirit of any faith which finds its central point in the individual conscience. It was more than right and wise, it was drawing a fresh tie between him and the great majority of his countrymen and his political followers, to give us the fine sentences in which he declares the "stifling of conscience and conviction" to be a kind of "moral murder," and protests against the notion that a limitation of the defining infallibility of Rome to the sphere of "faith and morals," can be regarded, in fact, as any limitation at all. The intellectual stronghold of Protestantism has rarely been described in finer words than those in which Mr. Gladstone tells us that he cares not " to ask if there be dregs and tatters of human life such as can escape from the description and boundary of 'morals.' I submit that duty is a power which rises with us in the morning and goes to rest with us at night. It is co-extensive with the action of our intelligence. It is the shadow which cleaves to us, go where we will, and which only leaves us when we leave the light of life" [and, we should think, by the way, not even then]. Again, Mr. Gladstone is within his province, and is discharging his duty as a statesman, when he explains his reason for believing that, under certain not very impos-alter, as formally publish the common sible, perhaps even not improbable, con- belief as to the centre of power in that tingencies, Rome might deem it wise to Church. If English statesmen only conmake a supreme effort to restore the ceded the Catholic claims on the strength temporal power, and that such an effort of statements made, and no doubt honmight involve a use of the most danger-estly made, by a few bishops and Vicars ous and objectionable of all her claims, -the abstract right she maintains to alienate the civil allegiance of Catholics from States hostile to that hopeless enterprise. In all this we go heartily with Mr. Gladstone, and regard what he says as both a sound and seasonable justification of his assertion that it is a dream to that penalties placed on the sincere fear the success of either Ritualists or confession of a creed however dangerous, Jesuits in re-converting England to the are sure to make that creed more dangerRoman faith. But when he appears to ous; that the civil power has a position intimate that the concession of Catholic of far greater moral advantage if it waits privileges by Parliament was really justi- for a practical infraction of its proper aufied by the partly politic and partly acci-thority before attempting to punish, than dental moderation of the Church of Rome if it makes the profession of opinion at the time they were conceded, and that penal; that men hardly know what they modern statesmen can fitly reproach Rome for assuming another tone,-one much more in keeping, by the way, with her whole history; when, again, he appears to indulge a serious belief that

Roman Catholics, bound as they are by an Ecumenical Council of the Church, will disavow that Council for the purpose of vindicating the assurances of Dr. Doyle and his colleagues in 1825; — and lastly, when he makes use of words quite needless to his purpose, and certain to rankle in the hearts of the Roman Catholics, like that, for instance, concerning "the degradation of the episcopal order" of the Latin Church, or that which accuses the Catholics of discharging their spiritual responsibilities by "power of attorney," or, again, that which compares the influence won by Rome's large claims, to the popularity gained by the immense promises of advertising tradesmen,- we think Mr. Gladstone, for the moment, puts off the exalted impartiality of the statesman, and accepts the position of a counsel for the plaintiff arguing for a verdict before a jury whom it is desirable to excite, in order to convince. And we cannot but regret that a moral and intellectual position so noble and so proof against assault as Mr. Gladstone's should be weakened by these mistakes.

To our minds, the Vatican Council simply assumed on behalf of the pope, while it consolidated and publicly imposed on all believers, an authority which had been virtually supreme in the Church of Rome for centuries previous to its formal enunciation. It did not so much

Apostolic at an epoch of low vitality in all Churches, they were not up to their work, and deserved the disappointment which Mr. Gladstone appears to feel. The true reasons for conceding these claims were quite independent of such temporary accidents, being such as these,

really believe and what they don't till they come to test it by action; and finally, that it is impossible to govern either Protestants or Roman Catholics strongly and equitably, while the former possess