the south; ignorant, honest, religious, and attached to their parents, in the centre; while in Paris we find, as we might have supposed, a people universally sensual, and easily disgusted with life. This is what we should have said without seeing M. Guerry's tables—this is what his tables teach us.

I do not, by these observations, mean to depreciate the class of work which I have been considering; it has undoubtedly its peculiar merits; but I see people at the present day insensible to its defects-astonished when a truth is proved to them by cyphers-credulous when an error is similarly asserted-and falling perpetually into trivialities, absurdities, and superficialities, merely becaue they think that nothing can be absurd, trivial, or superficial, which puts on a business-like appearance.*

The philosophers of the eighteenth century, material as they were, were not quite so material as we have become. Every argument now used must appeal to the senses; no doc

*How often do we find a manufacture or a country in that singular condition, which poor Pope so happily described when, turning from his doctor to his friend, he said, "Alas! my dear sir, I am dying every day of the most favourable symptoms."

trine is worth a farthing that does not march boldly forth, supported by figures. The orator, the philosopher, and even the novelist, address themselves "to facts." Facts, no doubt, are the necessary basis of general truths—but figures are not always facts: figures, impossible to contradict, are very frequently contradicted in politics as in science, by the mere absurdities they prove. For instance, by a subsidy granted to Philip de Valois (1328), it would appear that there were, at that time, eight millions of hearths or families, in the countries which at present compose France: eight millions of families, at the moderate calculation of four persons to a family, would give thirty two millions of inhabitants, the whole population of France at the present time. Voltaire cites this absurdity-in similar absurdities history abounds.

But M. Guerry's volume, as well from the ability of that gentleman, as from the conscientious scruples with which all his inquiries are conducted, is the most valuable work of this description which exists, or which we can hope for many years to see respecting the country on which I am writing.

Let me then return to the investigation I set out with, viz. "how far what he says of the

crimes, concurs with what I have said of the pleasures, of the French."

Do we find no connexion between the gallantry which formed the subject of a former chapter and the contents of this chapter? See we nothing to remark in the rapes of young men upon adults, in the rapes of old men upon children, in the female poisonings attendant upon adultery, in the immense population perishing in the enfans trouvés? Is there no connexion between the vanity I formerly spoke of, and the hatred and the vengeance which dictate so many crimes, and the disgust for life which leads to so many suicides ? Is there no connexion between the gay, and unthinking, and frivolous disposition which presides over the follies of the French, and the carelessness and recklessness of human life which swells the calendar of their guilt, and opens so remarkable, so terrible a chapter in the history of human nature ? This inquiry I do not venture to pursue my object is not to establish doctrines, but to awake attention. And now having hastily and feebly, but not, I trust, inaccurately sketched some of the principal features of French character, such as it appears before me, may I hope to lead my reader back to some of the later passages in French history, from which we must not wholly

divide the present--to some of those many rapidly succeeding changes, out of which a new people, different, but not separate from the old people, have grown up?-for this I am anxious to do, holding it impossible to speculate with any security on the future of a nation of which we have not studied the past.

END OF BOOK I.

BOOK II.

HISTORICAL CHANGES.

"Men will never see far into posterity who do not sometimes look backward to their ancestors."

BURKE.

"Je veux parler de la condition matérielle de la société, des changemens matériels introduits dans la manière d'être et de vivre des hommes, par un fait nouveau, par une révolution, par un nouvel état social."

GUIZOT.