bition, his first endeavours were to surround his name with such a degree of illumination as literary efforts might suffice to win it. Thus he composed in Switzerland an essay on that confederation, and a work on artillery, which gained him a certain measure of applause, and the honorary citizenship of the canton Thurgau. But in literary reputation he was immeasurably outshone by his cousin Charles of Canino, who, by his magnificent works on the ornithology of America and the natural history of Italy, has earned the highest fame of his family in fields of scientific and intellectual disquisition. Hence it was by proof rather of masculine daring and enterprise that he must found his hopes of achieving an acceptable renown. In a work he had published, intended for the political atmosphere of France, and entitled 'Rêveries Politiques,' he manifested republican tendencies mingled with a leaven of the imperial régime, attempting therein to embody perhaps the fantastic creation imagined by Lafayette of a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions.' With this as his manual of politics, he made an abortive attempt at Strasburg in 1836, when, dressed in the costume of the Emperor, he sought to kindle a military insurrection against what he thought the unsubstantial throne of Louis-Philippe. This scheme seemed so preposterous at the time, that it covered the audacious pretender with ridicule, and the King of the French thought fit to punish him simply by a voyage across the Atlantic in a frigate appointed for the purpose. Being disgorged on the soil of America, he soon found his way back to Switzerland, where, on the 3d October 1837, he closed the eyes of his devoted mother Hortense, Duchess of St Leu. Irritated by his unexpected reappearance within a year of his traitorous adventure, the French government procured his expulsion from Switzerland, and he retired to England, whence, in the year 1840, he executed his marvellous exploit of landing at Boulogne with a tame eagle and two or three dozen of followers, primed with champagne, and attired in the uniform of the 40th regiment of the line. He had judged the time arrived for taking possession of the French crown after the manner of his uncle in 1815, a considerable excitement then prevailing in France through the corpse of Napoleon having been removed from St Helena for interment at Paris. But the affair proved the most perfectly ludicrous and contemptible that was ever heard of; and the deluded prince was quietly shut up in the fortress of Ham with Count Montholon, one of the distinguished attendants of the Emperor in his exile, and who had been induced to join in the rash enterprise of the nephew. From this dolorous incarceration Louis - Napoleon contrived to effect his escape by a clever disguise on the morning of the 25th of May 1846: returning to England, he once more took up his quarters in London, and became a mere lounger in the gay society of the metropolis.

Before proceeding on this last expedition he had issued a preparatory work entitled 'Idées Napoleoniennes,' in which he expounded not only his own ideas on manifold important topics, but those also of his deceased and illustrious uncle. In this singular production he makes the Emperor talk after a peculiar fashion, discoursing largely on glory, liberty, popular sovereignty, division of property, and many other matters of most complex character. He would represent the beau ideal of a monarch suited to France. A man encircled by military glory he must be, but withal truly benevolent and philanthropic in his sentiments; maintaining stupendous armies and fleets, yet anxious to alleviate the burthens of taxation, and devoutly attached to peace; a little despotic at times, but with a rare love of national liberties,

and especially of their best guardian-the independence of the press. But it is objected to this elaborate compound of monarchical virtues that the military element is found obtrusively preponderating: and as Louis-Napoleon placed his principal hopes on the army, this preference was probably marked by design. Whilst in Ham, he beguiled the time by compilations of a different complexion. In the 'Fragmens Historiques,' he assimilates the revolutionary episodes of France and England, showing all the Bourbons to be exact parallels of the Stuarts, and keeps up a running commentary on himself in the character of the Duke of Monmonth. In a tractate on the question of sugar, which forms a sort of corn-law controversy in France, he is unpleasantly divided in his sympathies. As an imperial creation, he upholds protection to the native beet-root; but being a grandson of Josephine, he is extremely favourable to the interests of West-India planters: accordingly, he labours to demonstrate his equal solicitude for the antagonist causes. another work entitled 'L'Extinction du Pauperisme,' he handles the most difficult subject of modern times, but fails to emerge from the impracticable theories of the visionary school. He expatiates on the merits of agricultural colonies, but without giving any more feasible plan than the enthusiast Fourier. The development of manufactures also is a favourite notion of his, and this he thinks, contrary to the doctrines of economists, will be materially aided, if not effectually accomplished, by the use of artillerya sentiment which is probably not ill-adapted to the notions of the people over whom the writer longed to exercise authority.

In

The fate of Louis - Napoleon, till the present moment, is well known. However slenderly adapted by personal adventures or mental accomplishments to win popular approbation, to the astonishment of the world, he was named president of the Republic by an almost unanimous vote of the French people, December 10, 1848. The only rational means of accounting for this unlooked-for preference over men of tried character, was the traditional glory which clung to the name of the Bonapartes, and the desire to give some species of stability, even of despotism itself, to the tottering framework of French society. Thus again is revived in Europe the splendour of the Bonaparte family-but whether it will endure, depends probably less on the personal character of Louis-Napoleon than the exigencies of France, whose present condition is in the highest degree critical and unsatisfactory.

OUD have been the praises bestowed upon the illustrious 'Bourbons,' by many historiographers, especially by M. Désormeaux, whose book was printed at the 'Imprimerie Royale,' Paris, in 1788. He recounts in an ecstasy of loyal exultation, that from the parent stock of this great family there had already proceeded thirty-five kings of France, thirteen of Sicily, twenty-three of Portugal, eleven of Navarre, four of Spain, four of Hungary, Croatia, and Slavonia, seven emperors of Constantinople, one hundred dukes of Burgundy, Brittany, Anjou, Lorraine, Bourbon, and Brabant, besides crowned and ermined vassals of the royal house without number: an enumeration of thrones, principalities, and powers enough to take away the breath of any less enthusiastic man than the historian of the famous house, who had yet power to exclaim exultingly, as he concluded the glittering muster-roll, Tu regere imperio populos, O Galle memento! The long list of high, dread, and puissant lords and princes, of serene and august ladies and

princesses, is one for the most part rather to blush for than exult over —to excite grief and indignation rather than reverence or respect. Yet not without pure and bright passages are the leaves which bear the impress of the fightings, victories, perjuries, massacres, by which the Bourbon race distinguished themselves in an age when such things were accounted glorious or venial. Let us not, while glancing over histories which record many acts at which humanity shudders, forget to bear in mind that the world made withal great and real progress during the period in which these men and women reigned-that wonderful results were achieved in their time upon which our own higher civilisation is mainly based and reared. To dwell only upon the vices and failings of governments without looking to discover if there is no bright side to the dark and troubled picture, is only less absurd and disingenuous than the practice of carefully enumerating the persecutions and cruelties perpetrated in the name of outraged Christianity, while the overwhelming balance on the other side-the multitude of broken hearts it has bound up, the tears it has wiped away, the hopes it has kindled and purified, the lives it has redeemed and exalted, and the deaths it has soothed and sanctified—is ignored or overlooked.

The towering fortunes of the Bourbon family, like those of most other royalties, arose out of the natural working of the feudal system—a system which, originating in the necessities of conquest, fell naturally before the advancement of the great body of the people in knowledge and its consequence, power. The kings, or rather military chieftains, who reigned in Europe after the destruction of the Roman Empire, chiefly owed their continually-disputed supremacy either to their actual fame and prowess as warriors, or to their individual possessions in land and command over vassals holding directly from them by the tenure of military service. Private war being permitted, though strictly confined to possessors of fiefs on knightly tenure-contests by the great feudatories, sometimes against the crown, but chiefly among themselves, in conjunction with alliances by marriage, alternately elevated or depressed the relative power of the sovereign and the individual barons. The state was rather, in France and Germany especially, an aggregation of petty sovereignties, a federation of essentially independent despotisms, than a homogeneous kingdom. Every gentleman who held a fief on knightly tenure legally exercised the right of pillaging and imprisoning whomsoever was not sufficiently powerful to resist his authority; and even that of 'gallows tree,' held in strict legality to be a jewel of the royal or imperial crown, he not unfrequently usurped and exercised. The people, where they had a choice, generally sided with the monarch against the tyranny whose name was legion; and it is curious to remark how mainly king and people were aided in putting an end to the grosser enormities of the feudal system by the invention of such apparently-unpromising aids to civilisation as gunpowder and fire-arms. So long as knights and barons could issue from their castles, generally built in a naturally strong position, clothed in armour which the arrows of the serfs and common people could not penetrate, and their foray over, retire within their impregnable fastnesses, it seemed difficult to set limits to the duration of such knightly pastimes.

Combats of that period are recorded in which a few score knights routed and slew, without loss or danger to themselves, thousands of naked serfs and common people. But when the naked serf, possessing only the skill to point an iron tube, was placed upon a physical equality with the most redoubtable knight in Christendom, and cannon knocked the impregnable castles about the ancestral ears of the barons, it was time to think of other devices to secure or retain power, and of less violent means of livelihood; and, as Froissart pleasantly remarks, the baronage perforce ceased to rob on the highway ('Cessèrent de voler sur le grand chemin '). One of these great feudatories, with whom war was a pastime, and the attainment of extended power over the community an end which justified any and every species of fraud and violence, was Robert the Strong, Count of Paris, and Duke of France. He had gradually built up his ducal house till it overshadowed the dwarfed and sinking throne of the Merovingian kings of France; and Hugh Capet, his grandson, availing himself with skill and boldness of the feebleness and contempt into which the successors of Clovis had fallen, seized the crown, and by arms and policy so strengthened himself in his usurped seat, as not only to secure the regal authority to himself and immediate descendants, but to transmit it through the Valois and Bourbon branches of his house to our own time-the sceptre of France having been continuously wielded by his posterity, with the exception of less than a quarter of a century which elapsed between the death of Louis XVI. and the accession of Louis XVIII., till the Revolution of 1848. Hugh Capet was crowned at Rheims on the 3d of July 987. The Valois line of his house succeeded to the throne on the 1st of April 1328; the eldest Bourbon branch on the 2d of August 1589; and the younger Bourbons on the 9th of August 1830.

Neither the race of kings in direct line from Hugh Capet, nor those of the Valois branch of the royal house, who descended from a brother of Philip the Fair, need detain us long. Their histories for the most part are chiefly records of fightings, treacheries, intrigues, of no possible interest to the present reader. One great name, however, gleams out of the crowd of mediocrities, and claims a passing notice. We, unimaginative peoples of the north, have, it is well known, a constitutional objection to saints, insisting upon their being strictly confined to the primitive age of the church; and this may perhaps be the reason why the name of St Louis has been so depreciatingly treated by certain English writers, for it cannot be seriously or justly denied that St Louis was in every sense a great monarch, and a wise, enlightened man, ruling his people with a courage, sagacity, firmness, and gentleness of which the world has seen but few examples. Louis XI., too, of whom Sir Walter Scott in his 'Quentin Durward' has stamped so vivid and revolting an impression upon the reading world, however individually hateful or contemptible, was a great monarch: he governed France wisely and well; and spite of his Plessis-les-Tours atrocities, and his wretched superstitions, must ever be accounted one of the ablest, as unquestionably he was one of the most popular, kings that ever ruled the destinies of the French people. The nobles, it is true, detested him; for he curbed their insolence, and restrained and curtailed their privileges. Louis XI. not only disliked, and, as much as possible, avoided war, but refused to allow the seigneurs of France the unlimited right of chase over everybody's grounds,