be fairly reckoned three other edicts; the first of which, of the 30th of July, for the re-establishment of the royal military school, avowed its purpose to be, to give to the nobles of the kingdom the enjoyment of those advantages which had been granted them by an edict of 1751. One hundred years of previous nobility were necessary to procure admission for any pupil of this ancient school; and this drew a line at once between the old and new noblesse, in opposition to the third article of the charter, which made all employs, civil and military, equally open to all Frenchmen. Again, the fifty-ninth article maintained the existing tribunals and courts, and ordained that nothing should be changed in respect to them, except by a law. A law was proposed to the chamber of deputies, for the organization of the court of cassation; some amendments were proposed, but not adopted, and before the bill passed the chamber was adjourned: nevertheless, the king himself, without his parliament, re-organises this court, and expels many of its members, without pretext or declared motive. The public decided, justly, that this was not only an infraction of the charter and an insult to the chamber; but, moreover, that the evident motive of this measure was another breach of the charter, which in its eleventh article forbade all enquiry into any votes or opinions entertained previously to the restoration. The same breach was more strikingly hazarded in the expulsion of the fifteen members of the Institute-Guyton Morveau, Carnot, Monge, Napoléon Bonaparte, Cambacères, Merlin, Ræderer, Garat, Sieyes, Maury, Lucien Bonaparte, Lakanal, Gregoire, Joseph Bonaparte, and David.

The forty-eighth article of the charter forbade the establishment of any impost without the consent of the chambers and the sanction of the king; but the Chancellor Dambray, whom I find styled the great partizan of ancient barbarism, by his own authority established duties upon the provisions of the judges, upon letters of naturalization, and upon journals, in direct usurpation of a power solely legislative.

So much for the decided violations of the charter, which I should not have detailed had not a general opinion gone abroad in England that the complaints of the French against their good king were frivolous and unfounded, arising rather from their turbulence and a spirit of discontent, which gave importance to trifles, than from any just grounds of dissatisfaction, and of suspicion that the new government was determined to return to the ancient order of things. That such was the determination of the king, or of those in whose hands he was an instrument (it is indifferent which), other facts, not so palpable, perhaps, but conjointly of great weight, will leave little room to doubt. For these I must refer you to my next.

LETTER VI.

Paris, April

LEST there should be either in the preceding or the following letter any appearance of a partiality directed against the chief of the family of the Bourbons, I must premise, as before, that I am only a transcriber of opinions prevalent with a certain portion of France, or of statements become now a mere matter of record, relative to that illustrious house; and that, even as to the terms and epithets which bear hard may upon them, non ego, sed Democritus dixit," although, to avoid repetition, I do not qualify every sentence with the conditional phrase usual on such occasions. So far from suspecting me of any previous antipathy to this king, or kings in general, you will allow that the most efficient means of preserving thrones, is to show how they have been shaken, and that, if Louis should recover his crown, his best friend will be the man who shall then point out to him how he lost it before. With this proviso, I continue my narrative of feelings and of facts. The royalists, the pure, the returned royalists, always laughed when they pronounced the word charter, and scoffed at the revolutionary term “liberal ideas," which, in Spain, such is the benefit of restoration, has become a title of proscription. M. Dambray, the chancellor, took every opportunity of professing doctrines only suited to an absolute monarchy. M. Ferrand, director-general of the posts, Laisné, president of the chamber of deputies, the Abbé Montesquiou, and others, the known sycophants or pensioners of the court, besides the whole body of nobles, as well emigrant as those who had acquiesced in Napoleon's tyranny, and the clergy at large, adopted the same language.

You may recollect that the members of the ancient parliament, assembled at the house of M. Lepelletier de Morfontaine, protested formally against the constitutional charter on the 4th of June; and that the nobility, headed by the princes of the blood, prepared the same protest, which was only not signed and delivered, in support of their former rights. A decided conduct on the part of Louis would have shewn that he partook of no such superannuated notions; but, acting as he did, whatever were his real wishes and final intentions, he ran the risk of being involved in the general hatred and suspicion excited against the ministers, the nobles, and the clergy, throughout the capital and the greater part of France. It is extraordinary that he should have thought it possible to force a whole people to retrograde by

means of a handful of partisans without skill or courage, already known and suspected of anti-national designs, for Louis was well aware of the progress of liberal opinions in France, since the first appeal which he made to his people upon the landing of Napoleon told them to rally round the charter. It is truly edifying to observe, that in the change which that event produced in the language of his majesty and the royalists, may be recognized all that they ought to have done, and all they did not do. Laisné, the president of the representatives of the people, and the organ of the famous maxim, "If the king wills it, the law wills it," then told the chamber of deputies that the king was preparing wise laws on the imposts, on the finances, for the irrevocable dotation of the legion of honour, for the responsibility of ministers, and for the definitive establishment of the liberty of the press-all this was just about to be done, when the genius of evil arose to overturn all their hopes, and to break that constitutional charter, the sacred palladium of the safety of the state. The majority of the chamber of deputies, which had before registered all the ministers' wishes almost without a murmur, now declared that every placard against the acquirers of national domains, or in favour of feudalism, tithes, or other seignorial rights, should be considered as a conspiracy, and subject the authors to reclusion. It is consoling for all lovers of liberty to see that despots and their slaves must, in the day of danger, have recourse to their people, and must apply themselves to the common propensity of mankind in favour of individual independence. This Mr. Laisné had been one of those who lent themselves most directly to that portion of the cabinet which had determined upon the partial restoration, at least, of the national lands, and which, by so doing, may be considered as the principal cause of the late revolution.

The disquiet most prevalent, and most likely to prevail at the return of the Bourbons, arose from a suspicion that the national property of both kinds, that is, the property formerly belonging to the church, and distinguished under the name of biens nationaux de première origine, and that arising from the possessions of emigrants, called simply biens nationaux, might, by some stratagem, be restored to the ancient possessors or their representatives. The principal portion of these properties being sold, partly even in the time of Louis XVI., a number, amounting, it is said, to six millions and a half of people, had become interested in the perpetual settlement of these possessions in the hands of the present owners; and the nation itself was concerned in the disposal of the unsold portion of these properties, as they had been allotted by the imperial government for the maintenance of the hospitals and of the legion of honour. It

was natural, therefore, that Louis should spare no promises to set the minds of his subjects at ease on this important point; and it seemed to the French no less according to rule, that having made these promises, and confirmed them by the 9th article of the charter, he should, when his object was obtained, contrive to break them. I must, indeed, even on my own part, say, that what has given rise to the expression, "the faith of a king," I am unable to divine, history containing little else but events caused by their want of faith. His first object was to obtain his throne, his second to strengthen it. Unfortunately he thought of no better method than to remunerate the faction of his followers at the expense of the nation, or at least of another faction a thousand times more powerful. So early as the 4th of June, an ordonnance of the king expressed a wish to restore the unsold properties to the ancient proprietors; and as this could not be done without a positive law, and a pretext of exchange, although several establishments of the legion of honour had already been deprived of their funds, M. Ferrand, the minister, proposed this law; and, in his speech, made use of the fatal expression "the sacred inviolable rights which those who have followed the right line must have on the properties, of which, by the revolutionary storms, they had been despoiled." The project was referred to a committee, of which M. Bedoch being the reporter, by the noble firmness of his opposition to the law, and the amendment by which he proposed that it should be declared, that "at no time, under any pretext, should there be granted any indemnity to the ancient proprietors," only drew down the still more fatal sentence of the president Laisné, who said he would not consent to the amendment, "because he would not shut the door against hope." Not a word was lost throughout France. This was no party question: men who will live quietly under the Emperor of Morocco will be driven into madness by a hint of losing their own. True it is, that the king affects in his late proclamation to treat this rumour of his wishing to restore the national properties as a base calumny: he has the insolence, I use the word, to say he will not deign to reply to such a ridiculous charge. “A king must not lower himself," he tells his people, "to refute groundless accusations :" if so, he must be content not to reign: if he chooses to be independent, he must retire: would he drop the censure, he should get rid of his subjects; but if he will consent neither to abdicate nor to argue, his people must continue unanswered and in arms against him. But the king, or M. de Chateaubriand, who drew up the proclamation, knew very well that no reply is to be made to the charge. You want no more proof than what has been brought to shew that the French had grounds for their alarm; and it may be

added, that it was indifferent to them whether the king himself, or the system of his administration, gave rise to their just suspicions. However, it may be worth while to strengthen your conviction, by mentioning an extraordinary fact, which will evince the pains that were taken, and the engines that were set at work to bring about the change so much desired by the restored court. When the fear of the king and his friends extorted, during the march of Napoleon, some attempts at justice, a committee was appointed in the chamber of deputies to examine into the petitions lying unpresented in the parliament offices. Amongst them were discovered nearly three hundred, which had been kept back by the Abbé Montesquiou, from individuals complaining that they had been refused absolution by their priests on account of being possessors of national properties. The restitution of these properties was thus made the sine qua non of salvation; and, indeed, at Savenay in the Lower Loire, a sermon was preached on the 5th of March, in which the audience were told, that those who did not return "their own" to the nobles and to the curés, as the representatives of the monks, should have the lot of Jezebel, and should be devoured by dogs. It is not at all wonderful that the nobles and clergy should endeavour to recover what was formerly attached to those two privileged classes: but it is wonderful that any one should expect that the restitution could be made without the utmost resistance from the present owners, or should be indignant that the resistance was made. Every one at Paris at the time knew that the nobles talked openly of the restitution, and joining with the monied men, who are always, in some degree, in the hands of the government, so depreciated the securities and value of these properties, that no one would advance any sum upon them. Let us wait a little, said these gentlemen, and we shall get our properties back again for as little as was originally given for them, if they are not restored by force. But the national goods had been most of them often sold and resold, and the last purchasers, having no concern with the low price of the original confiscations, felt the full injustice and hardship of the projected restitution. Nor was the mere change of hands the whole of the evil to be dreaded by the property passing into the purses of the old owners; every abuse of the ancient system was naturally supposed the consequence of the return of the nobles and the clergy. Seignorial rights, feudalism, tithes, benefices, were in every mouth, and with some reason; for several of the returned nobles were indiscreet enough to claim certain of these seignorial rights, that of exclusive chase, for instance, over their former properties, even when not restored. Although Voltaire proved the mistake of Montesquiou in saying that feudalism is an event which has