Tarare was not allowed to be a monarch at all; and when the opera was performed in 1795, the victorious soldier indignantly refuses the crown. Under Buonaparte 'Tarare' was again recast to bring it into harmony with the delusion of the hour; and lastly, when in 1819 the performance was witnessed by Moore, Tarare, become more monarchical than ever, displays his loyalty by defending the king of Ormuz from a popular insurrection, and ultimately falls with emotion at the feet of the tyrant, who has the magnanimity to restore his wife to him. Even in its original form Tarare was not a masterpiece, but it was so impaired by the perpetual alterations, that, popular at the beginning, it was at length thrown aside as a worn-out piece of refuse. The destinies of France have been analogous in their changes to those of Tarare, which did, indeed, but reflect them; and there is real ground for apprehension that the ultimate result may not be dissimilar. It is difficult to see whence France is to derive the respect for the laws and the moral courage which are essential to the lasting establishment of a liberal monarchy. Political parties not only look upon the present government as a mere convenient interlude which is to serve their turn and then be swept from the stage, but they already speak-most curious fact of their determination to overthrow the government which they anticipate will succeed it. It was only the other day that the leaders of the republican party, who met in Paris in order to consult upon the course they should adopt in consequence of the fusion of the two branches of the Bourbon family, agreed to support the claims of the Duke of Bordeaux, because he could afterwards be more easily got rid of than Louis Napoleon. Such are the turbulent spirits who would coolly march on from revolution to revolution in an endless vista. And what elements of resistance are there to be found in the rest of the nation to despotism on the one hand, and anarchy on the other? When the coup d'état of the 2nd of December, 1851, could be so easily accomplished, there could certainly be no steady political character among the people, no wide-spread passion for national liberty. The middle classes in France are, in truth, fatigued and apathetic, and only care to make money and to job in stocks. It is a fact that, after the coup d'état, while the soldiers were firing on inoffensive women and children in the Boulevards of Paris, letters were written by respectable citizens to persons in London, in which, after carelessly alluding to the events of the day, it was significantly remarked that Les bons Français restent chez eux. The only excuse which these 'bons Français' have ever put forth is, that the iron hand of despotism was their sole defence from the multitudinous reptile claws of socialism. socialism. But without insisting upon what is now an admitted fact, that the power of socialism was immensely exaggerated, this new appeal to the terrible goddess Necessity, who has been so often and so fatally invoked in France since 1789, is a fresh proof of the want of moral courage in the nation. For the purpose of combining order and liberty, and of constructing again in France a liberal monarchical government, M. Guizot was naturally induced to make an appeal to the most conservative bodies-the army, the Church, and the magistracy. But the army is seldom an instrument of freedom, though, when once liberty is firmly established, the military may be a defence to it from revolutionary aggressions. The Church and magistracy are better adapted to respond to M. Guizot's call; but, having been frightened by revolutionists, they have sacrificed with the rest to the goddess-Necessity. The réquisitoire recently addressed by M. Rouland to the procureur-général of the Imperial Court of Paris upon the men accused of a conspiracy against the life of Louis Napoleon, is the work of an honest man who does not conceal his sympathies for a more liberal government, but even he calls upon the juries to condemn the prisoners on this standing plea of necessity. If the liberty of defence were not shackled as it is, the accused might have retorted that it was in the name of a similar necessity that 60 years ago Fouquier-Tainville demanded of the republican juries to send to the scaffold the victims of the reign of terror. They might have added, that in contriving a violent attack against Louis Napoleon they only imitated his own attacks upon Louis Philippe, and that the fall of the present emperor seemed as necessary to them, as some years ago the overthrow of the late king appeared indispensable to him. Necessity is the plea to excuse every crime which admits of no other extenuation; it overleaps the checks of law; it sets aside justice; it turns a deaf ear to conscience; and the judge who appeals to it is not the man who can aid in M. Guizot's scheme for defying the temptations to a guilty and short-sighted expediency for the sake of establishing the supremacy of a righteous freedom over licentious force. The great physician Boerhaave wrote a dissertation on the question, Why conversions-so scarce now-were so frequent in the ages of the Primitive Church? The answer is not very difficult. Christianity, being truth, could not fail to be triumphant when martyrs volunteered to shed their blood in defence of their faith. By calmly forbidding the entrance of the imperial sinner to the Church of Milan, the heroic Ambrose did much more for the real greatness and for the universal triumph of religion than the whole tribe of Spanish inquisitors, with all their bloody zeal, or Pope Hildebrand with all the wars he stirred up. At that primitive period, blind necessity-the most implacable 'Avayan, the worst of all the divinities of Olympus-was never worshipped by the priests of Jesus Christ. The present French Church seems not so averse to the worship of Necessity. In 1848 the parish ministers of Paris, to court the mob, attended officially in their sacerdotal robes at the erection of the Arbres de la Liberté, and even sometimes pronounced speeches which might have dropped from the lips of the most fervid of demagogues. A few months afterwards and the clergy sacrificed again to Necessity. They bestowed the most disgusting adulation upon Louis Napoleon, and declared publicly that the first Buonaparte-whom they had called Antichrist during his life, and by whose orders Rome had been invaded, and Pope Pius VII. carried a prisoner to France-was the greatest man of modern times. The clergy once had other ideas of greatness than to apply it by way of unrestricted eulogy to a perpetrator of splendid crimes. Thus it is difficult to imagine that M. Guizot will find in the present French Church the support necessary for the establishment of steady moral and political principles. As for liberty, whenever he has made an appeal to religion in behalf of his endeavours, he has been sternly reminded by the leaders of the Roman Catholic party in France, that the fundamental doctrine of their Church is authority. The only sympathy they bestow upon him is to exclaim that it is a pity such a man should uphold at the meetings of the Bible Society of Paris the insane dogma that every one has a right to inquire for himself, instead of blindly adopting the convictions of others.* To men of a noble temper difficulties are only a spur to exertion; and the consistency which M. Guizot continues to display, and the political wisdom which he teaches, cannot utterly be thrown away. They must be working, we are persuaded, a slow and silent change in the minds of many, and are not the least important of the services he has rendered to his country. But while the middle classes continue what they are, there can be no lasting union of freedom and order. A set of nominal parliamentary institutions do not constitute liberty, for the strongest fortress falls an easy prey when it is left undefended. The French delight to call themselves the grande nation; and we will not deny that, in many respects, they are *M. Guizot has recently collected his essays on religion, philosophy, and education into a single volume, under the title of Meditations and Moral Studies, This work, which at present is scarcely known in England, deserves particular attention. entitled entitled to the name; but intellectual, and above all, military greatness is what they most adore, while of moral greatness they have, for the most part, no conception at all. When they have reached the point of recognising the defect, and aspire to correct it; when they begin to comprehend that the patriotism of which they talk so much, and understand so little, means loving your country more than yourself; when they have the dignity to maintain their convictions in the face of day and the mob, instead of yielding to the dictates of a skulking and deceitful prudence; then, and not until then, we shall believe that France is ripe for a liberal monarchy. ART. V.-1. Papers respecting the Civil War in China. Presented to the House of Lords by command of her Majesty. 1853. 2. L'Insurrection en Chine, &c. Paris, 1853. Par MM. Callery et Yvan. 3. The Cross and the Dragon, or the Fortunes of Christianity in China. By John Kesson, of the British Museum. London, 1854. 4. Christianity in China. London. 5. The Chinese Missionary Gleaner. London. 6. The Religious Tracts of the Christian Revolutionists in China. London. R. GUTZLAFF, at the close of one of his works, written several years ago, incidentally remarked, that if Christianity should at any time gain an effectual entrance into China, it would probably be accompanied by a revolution. Recent events render the remark observable, although perhaps it did not require any very great prophetic insight to hazard the conjecture. He saw the whole face of Chinese life, social as well as political, not merely torpid and stagnant, but so encrusted with the stereotyped forms, traditions, and conventionalities of centuries, that it could not be changed without being at once broken up. He saw the minds of the most educated among the Chinese travelling round the same circle of ideas, never daring to roam beyond it, or to rise above the level of those measures of thought which had been prescribed in a certain compendium of all possible knowledge in sixty-four volumes, which bears the imposing title of San-tsae-hoo-hoey. He felt, moreover, that the Gospel carried with it a regenerating power, which, affecting the springs of thought and emotion, and consequently of action, must influence whenever whenever it is embraced, the whole political and personal life of men. Hence he inferred that the new ideas infused from this source into that inert mass of human beings must ferment and swell until they burst the superincumbent weight of antiquated custom and error which cramped and confined the energies of the people. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the event has exactly realised the conjecture of Dr. Gutzlaff in the sense in which he propounded it. It is true that a revolution has arisen and gone hand in hand with a certain profession of Christianity among the insurgents, but it would be wholly erroneous to suppose that the civil war owed its origin to the diffusion of Christian sentiments. The rebellion is purely political in its first objects, and has arisen from a deeply-seated and long-cherished antipathy among the old Chinese inhabitants of the south to the Tartar invaders of the north. A mere comparison of dates is sufficient to establish this point. The old Emperor, Tao-Kouang, whose liberal government, under the direction of Mou-tchang-ha, and especially of Ki-in, promised a new era of prosperity to China, died on the 26th February 1850. His son, Hien-fung, young and rash, sensual and narrow-minded, ascended the throne. His father's ministers were forthwith degraded. Mandarins of the old stamp, and full of the antiquated Chinese prejudices, assumed the direction of affairs, and in August of the same year the rebellion broke out. The circumstance of a certain profession of Christianity having mixed itself with the outbreak is purely accidental; the religious element was simply auxiliary to the political, although undoubtedly it has tended very largely to infuse vigour and fanaticism into the insurrection, and invests it with a peculiar interest and importance. It is not our purpose now to trace the course of the revolution in its political phases or history. The outline of it is soon drawn. Taking its rise from among one of the many secret societies which, under some literary or other pretext, have constantly cherished political and even revolutionary designs, the smouldering fire was first fanned into a flame in the southwestern province of Quang-si, where it found its proper aliment among the hardy and turbulent mountaineers, named the Miaotze, who dwell upon its northern frontier. MM. Callery and Yvan, who were formerly attached to the French embassy in China, the former, we believe, in the character of a missionary, the latter in the capacity of physician, have traced with graphic liveliness-too graphic to admit of our according entire credence to all the details-the progress of the insurrection in its early stages, and in its first successes against the unfortunate Siu, who was |