the advantage of knowing, by very recent experience, how much they must gain by bestowing the crown upon one who, having none of the absurd but powerful pretensions of legitimacy, should be able to plead no rights nor pretexts not conveyed by themselves and created by their own sole choice. They could not fail to be aware how indispensable was their duty to repress all those favourable inclinations, all that confidence and affection towards their new monarch, which had delivered the nation, bound, as it were, hand and foot, into the power of a base, revengeful, and vicious tyrant. I have sometimes doubted my eyes, in reading the charge to the jury on the trial of the regicides, by Sir Orlando Bridgeman, thinking it impossible to recognise in the slavish doctrine therein laid down as the law and constitution of England the avowed sentiments of an individual, distinguished by his dignity and character, belonging to a nation which had afforded so splendid an example of hatred and resistance of despotism. The sufferings which the country had endured from her internal struggles might have induced this judge to cite, and his audience to hear with complacency, those statutes and legal opinions which were built upon the divine right and uncontrolable power of kings; but the fact that those ridiculous and wicked pretensions should have been supported in face of a nation

who had just given them such a practical disproof, and the observation of the consequences which ensued from their admission as just maxims of government, may serve as a perpetual lesson to all nations, and should have taught the French in 1814 with what cautions, and reserves, and conditions, to receive a monarch, who might look upon his ascent to the throne as a restoration and the recovery of a right. Louis lost no time in displaying to his subjects his determination to be considered as their legitimate monarch, restored to the throne in the twentieth year from the date of the period at which he had been called to the hereditary possession of the crown of France. It cannot be denied that the first check given to the enthusiasm produced by the return of the Bourbons was by this silly enumeration of the nineteen years during which Louis had reigned over his titular kingdom in partibus infidelium. The king had been fairly called to the throne by the only power then representing the French nation; he did not, certainly, possess it by the right of conquest, obtained either by his own armies or those of the sovereign allies-for army he had none. The Count of Artois had been neither seconded by the people nor recognised by the foreign princes; and only fifteen days before the taking of Paris these princes were willing to secure the dynasty of Napoleon by an honourable peace;

and after that event they had treated with the provisional government, and had declared that France was free in her choice of a sovereign. It has not yet appeared that the calling Louis XVIII. to the throne was the only condition upon which peace was to be given to France; so that the new monarch should have attributed some share, at least, of his right to the choice of his countrymen. Whatever had been his opinions as to the extent of the force and necessity which influenced his election, it is inconceivable how he should have refused to introduce, were it only as a rhetorical flourish, only one word about the unanimous wish and election of eight and twenty millions of his countrymen, and have lost sight of the whole French nation in his grateful remembrance of God, the Prince Regent, and his own hereditary rights. The Count of Artois deigned to thank the senate de ce qu'il a fait pour le bonheur de la France, en rappelant son souverain legitime, but assumed a false position in the very terms by which he expressed the obligations of France for the recal of her legitimate sovereign. In the same manner when Louis wrote his proclamation dated January, 1814, at Hartwell, although he announced his wish to hold by the efforts of his subjects that throne to which his rights and their love could alone give strength, he showed he was already king, and

had inherited certain subjects and peoples, out of which he was kept by the incumbent owner. By the constitution of the 6th of April, 1814, Louis Stanislaus Xavier was freely called to the throne of France, and was to be proclaimed king of the French when he should have signed and accepted that constitution by a solemn act and oath. Under the presumption that he would accept the proposed terms, his brother was appointed lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and himself suffered to arrive at St. Ouen, where he refused his assent to the constitution, and by his declaration of the 2d of May declared himself King of France and Navarre, by the grace of God. By thus eluding the subscription to the act which called him to the throne, he only behaved in conformity with his former opinions, which prompted him to protest against the acceptation of the constitution of 1791 by Louis XVI., and to declare by his letter to the sovereigns in 1804, all the acts illegal which had been promulgated since the opening of the states-general in France. "Je déclare donc, après avoir au besoin renouvelé mes protestations contre tous les actes illégaux qui, depuis l'ouverture des états-généraux de France, ont amené la crisé effrayante." These are his very words; words; these words should have been recollected by Frenchmen when they deliberated on the choice of a king. It must be confessed, however, that the senate,

having once resolved upon Louis, took every precaution in their power to guard the nation from the reassumption of rights which had been acknowledged obsolete by all the powers of Europe, in their several treaties with France since the period of the revolution. They could not, it seems, in the then state of France, prevent the king from arriving at St. Ouen; and if he dared, previously to his entry, to throw off the mask, the disgrace should not in fairness attach to those who were betrayed, but to the deceiver himself. The king's title cannot rest upon any other right than that given him by the constitution of the 6th of April, which annexed as a condition, sine qua non, the acceptance of this constitution; so that, supposing the senate to have had no power to act for the nation-supposing them to have been as they are now called in France, a handful of traitors, Louis was never lawful king of France: but supposing the senate to have represented and acted upon the known wish of the people, and so to have had a right to call Louis to the crown, it is clear, that if the king never fulfilled the only condition annexed to his election, he was also, in that point of view, at no time lawful king of France. I use the word lawful, in contradistinction to the term legitimate, which seems to have been lately adopted to distin guish the bastard pretensions of election from