wanderings and unwelcome return to their own country, from whence they have been driven twice since—but up to that period they find no such levelling doctrine inscribed either in the records of history or on their crest and coat of arms or in the forms of religion or in the ancient laws and institutions of the kingdom. Which version will they then believe or turn a deaf ear to that which represents them as God's vicegerents upon earth, or that which holds them up as the enemies of the human race and the scoff and outcasts of their country? Every, the meanest individual has a standard of estimation in his own breast, which is that he is of more importance than all the rest of the world put together; but a king is the only person with respect to whom all the rest of the world join or have ever joined in the same conclusion; and be assured that having encouraged him in this opinion, he will do every thing in his power to keep them to it till his last gasp. You have sworn to a man that he is a god: this is indeed the most solemn of compacts. Any attempt to infringe it, any breath throwing a doubt upon it, is treason, rebellion, impiety. Would you be so unjust as to retract the boon, he will not be so unjust to himself as to let you. He would sooner suffer ten deaths and forfeit twenty

kingdoms than patiently submit to the indignity of having his right called in question. It is said, Charles X. is a good-natured man: it may be so, and that he would not hurt a fly; but in that quarrel he would shed the blood of millions of men. If he did not do so, he would consider himself as dead to honour, a recreant to fame, and a traitor to the cause of kings. Touch but that string, the inborn dignity of kings and their title to "solely sovereign sway and masterdom," and the milk of human kindness in the best-natured. monarch turns to gall and bitterness. You might as well present a naked sword to his breast, as be guilty of a word or look that can bear any other construction than that of implicit homage and obedience. There is a spark of pride lurking at the bottom of his heart, however glozed over by smiles and fair speeches, ever ready (with the smallest opposition to his will) to kindle into a flame, and desolate kingdoms. Let but the voice of freedom speak, and to resist "shall be in him remorse, what bloody work soever" be the consequence. Good-natured kings, like good-natured men, are often merely lovers of their own ease. who give themselves no trouble about. other people's affairs: but interfere in the slightest point with their convenience, interest,

or self-love, and a tigress is not more furious in defence of her young. While the Royal Guards were massacring the citizens of Paris, Charles X. was partridge-shooting at St Cloud, to show that the shooting of his subjects and the shooting of game were equally among the menus plaisirs of royalty. This is what is meant by mild paternal sway, by the perfection of a good-natured monarch, when he orders the destruction of as great a number of people as will not do what he pleases, without any discomposure of dress or features. Away with such trifling! There is no end of the confusion and mischief occasioned by the application of this mode of arguing from personal character and appearances to public measures and principles. If we are to believe the fashionable cant on this subject, a man cannot do a dirty action because he wears a clean shirt: he cannot break an oath to a nation, because he pays a gambling debt; and because he is delighted with the universal homage that is paid him, with having every luxury and every pomp at his disposal, he cannot, under the mask of courtesy and good humour, conceal designs against a Constitution, or "smile and smile and be a tyrant!" Such is the logic of the Times. This paper, "ever strong upon the stronger side,"

laughs to scorn the very idea entertained by our "restless and mercurial neighbours" (as if the Times had nothing of the tourniquet principle in its composition) that so amiable, so well-meaning and prosperous a gentleman as Charles X. should nourish an old and inveterate grudge against the liberties of his country or wish to overturn that happy order of things which the Times had so great a share in establishing. But he no sooner verifies the predictions of the French journalists and is tumbled from his throne, than the Times with its jolly, swaggering, thrasonical air falls upon him and calls him all the vagabonds it can set its tongue to. We do not see the wit of this, any more than of its assuring us, with unabated confidence, that there is not the least shadow of foundation for the apprehensions of those who are perverse enough to think, that a Ministry that have set up and countenanced the Continental despotisms, and uniformly shown themselves worse than indifferent to the blood and groans of thousands of victims in foreign countries (sacrificed under their guarantee of the deliverance of mankind) may have an arrière-pensée against the liberties of their own. We grant the premises of the Times in either case, that the French king was good-humoured and that the Duke has a vacant

face; but these favourable appearances have not prevented a violent catastrophe in the one case and may not in the other. Mr Brougham a short time ago, in a speech at a public meeting, gave his hearty approbation of the late Revolution in France, and clenched his argument by asking what fate an English monarch would merit, and probably meet, who acted in the same manner as the besotted Charles; who annulled the liberty of the press, who prevented the meeting of the representatives of the people, who disfranchised four-fifths of the electors by an arbitrary decree, and proposed to reign without law, and raise the taxes without a Parliament? This is not exactly the point at issue. A more home question would be, what fate a king of England would deserve, not who did or attempted all this in his own person, but who fearing to do that, as the next best thing and to show which way his inclinations tended, aided and abetted with all the might and resources of a people calling itself free, and tried to force back upon a neighbouring state, by a long and cruel war and with the ruin of his own subjects, a king like Charles X., who by every act and circumstance of his life had shown himself hostile to the welfare and freedom of his country, and whose conduct, if repeated here, would