soldier, exile, college teacher, wanderer among American Indian tribes, resident of Philadelphia, and of Bloomingdale in the New York suburbs, is King of the French. Well had Carlyle gauged his position, after some years of reign, when he described him " as struggling under sad circumstances to be called King of the French for a season." He ought to have been a great man; he had had a great training. All his promise as a man faded when his seeming success began to shine. He had apparently learned nothing of adversity; he was able to learn nothing of prosperity and greatness. Of all men whom his time had tried, he ought best to have known, one might think, the vanity of human. schemes, and the futility of trying to uphold thrones on false principles. He intrigued for power as if his previous experience had taught him that power once obtained was inalienable. He seemed at one time to have no real faith in anything but chicane. He made the fairest professions, and did the meanest, falsest things. He talked to Queen Victoria in language that might have brought tears into a father's eyes; and he was all the time planning the detestable juggle of the Spanish marriages. He did not even seem to retain the courage of his youth. It went, apparently, with whatever of true, unselfish principle he had when he was yet a young soldier of the Republic. He was like our own James II., who as a youth extorted the praise of the great Turenne for his bravery, and as a king earned the scorn of the world for his pusillanimous imbecility. Some people say that there remained a gleam of perverted principle in Louis Philippe which broke out just at the close, and, unluckily for him, exactly at the wrong time. It is asserted that he could have put down the movement of 1848 in the beginning with one decisive word. Certainly those who began that movement were as little prepared as he for its turning out a revolution. It is generally assumed that he halted and dallied and refused to give the word of command out of sheer weakness of mind and lack of courage. But the assumption, according to some, is unjust. Their theory is that Louis Philippe at that moment of crisis was seized with a conscientious scruple, and believed that having been called to power by the choice of the people-called to rule not as King of France, but as King of the French-as

King, that is to say, of the French people so long as they chose to have him-he was not authorized to maintain himself on that throne by force. The feeling would have been just and right if it were certain that the French people, or any majority of the French people, really wished him away, and were prepared to welcome a republic. But it was hardly fair to those who set him on the throne to assume at once that he was bound to come down from it at the bidding of no matter whom, how few or how many, and without in some way trying conclusions to see if it were the voice of France that summoned him to descend, or only the outcry of a moment and a crowd. The scruple, if it existed, lost the throne; in which we are far from saying that France suffered any great loss. We are bound to say that M. Thiers, who ought to have known, does not seem to have believed in the operation of any scruple of the kind, and ascribes the King's fall simply to blundering and to bad advice. But it would have been curiously illustrative of the odd contradictions of human nature, and especially curious as illustrating that one very odd and mixed nature, if Louis Philippe had really felt such a scruple and yielded to it. He had carried out with full deliberation, and in spite of all remonstrance, schemes which tore asunder human lives, blighted human happiness, played at dice with the destinies of whole nations, and might have involved all Europe in war, and it does not seem that he ever felt one twinge of scruple or acknowledged one pang of remorse. His policy had been unutterably mean and selfish and deceitful. His very bourgeois virtues, on which he was so much inclined to boast himself, had been a sham; for he had carried out schemes which defied and flouted the first principles of human virtue, and made as light of the honor of woman as of the integrity of man. It would humor the irony of fate if he had sacrificed his crown to a scruple which a man of really high principle would well have felt justified in banishing from his mind. One is reminded of the daughter of Macklin, the famous actor, who having made her success on the stage by appearing constantly in pieces which compelled the most liberal display of form and limbs to all the house and all the town, died of a slight injury to her knee, which she allowed to grow mortal rather

than permit any doctor to look at the suffering place. In Louis Philippe's case, too, the scruple would show so oddly that even the sacrifice it entailed could scarcely make us regard it with respect.

He died in exile among us, the clever, unwise, grand, mean old man. There was a great deal about him which made him respected in private life, and when he had nothing to do with state intrigues and the foreign policy of courts. He was much liked in England, where for many years after his sons lived. But there were Englishmen who did not like him, and did not readily forgive him. One of these was Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a few days after the death of Louis Philippe, expressing his sentiments thereupon with the utmost directness. "The death of Louis Philippe," he said, "delivers me from my most artful and inveterate enemy, whose position gave him in many ways the power to injure me. Louis Philippe always detested Lord Palmerston, and, according to Thiers, was constantly saying witty and spiteful things of the English minister, which good-natured friends as constantly brought to Palmerston's ears. When Lord Palmerston did not feel exactly as a good Christian ought to have felt, he at least never pretended to any such feeling. The same letter contains immediately after a reference to Sir Robert Peel. It, too, is characteristic. "Though I am sorry for the death of Peel from personal regard, and because it is no doubt a great loss to the country, yet, so far as my own political position is concerned, I do not think that he was ever disposed to do me any good turn." A little while before, Prince Albert, writing to his friend Baron Stockmar, had spoken of Peel as having somewhat unduly favored Palmerston's foreign policy in the great Pacifico debate, or at least not having borne as severely as he might upon it, and for a certainly not selfish reason. "He" (Peel) "could not call the policy good, and yet he did not wish to damage the ministry, and this solely because he considered that a Protectionist Ministry succeeding them would be dangerous. to the country, and had quite determined not to take office himself. But would the fact that his health no longer admitted of his doing so have been sufficient, as time went on, to make his followers and friends bear with patient resigna

tion their own permanent exclusion from office? I doubt it." The Prince might well doubt it: if Peel had lived, it is all but certain that he would have had to take office. It is curious, however, to notice how completely Prince Albert and Lord Palmerston are at odds in their way of estimating Peel's political attitude before his death. Lord Palmerston's quiet way of setting Peel down as one who would never be disposed to do him a good turn is characteristic of the manner in which the Foreign Secretary went in for the game of politics. Palmerston was a man of kindly instincts and genial temperament. He was much loved by his friends. His feelings were always directing him toward a certain half-indolent benevolence. But the game of politics was to him like the hunting-field. One cannot stop to help a friend out of a ditch, or to lament over him if he is down and seriously injured: for the hour the only thing is to keep on one's way. In the political game Lord Palmerston was playing, enemies were only obstacles, and it would be absurd to pretend to be sorry when they were out of his path therefore there is no affectation of generous regret for Louis Philippe. Political rivals, even if private friends, are something like obstacles too. Palmerston is of opinion that Peel would never be disposed to do him a good turn, and therefore indulges in no sentimental regret for his death. He is a loss to the country, no doubt, and personally one is sorry for him, of course, and all that: "which done, God take King Edward to his mercy, and leave the world for me to bustle in." The world certainly was more free henceforth for Lord Palmerston's active and unresting spirit to bustle in.

CHAPTER XX.

THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL.

THE autumn of 1850 and the greater part of 1851 were disturbed by an agitation which seems strangely out of keeping with our present condition of religious liberty and civilization. A struggle with the Papal Court might appear to be a practical impossibility for the England of our time. The mind has to go back some centuries to put it

self into what would appear the proper framework for such events. Legislation or even agitation against Papal aggression would seem about as superfluous in our modern English days, as the use of any of the once-popular charms which were believed to hinder witches of their will. The story is extraordinary, and is in many ways instructive.

For some time previous to 1850 there had been, as we have seen already, a certain movement among some scholarly, mystical men in England toward the Roman Church. We have already shown how this movement began, and how little it could fairly be said to represent any actual impulse of reaction among the English people. But it unquestionably made a profound impression in Rome. The court of Rome then saw everything through the eyes of ecclesiasties; and a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic not well acquainted with the actual conditions of English life might well be excused if, when he found that two or three great Englishmen had gone over to the Church, he fancied that they were but the vanguard of a vast popular or national movement. It is clear that the court of Rome was quite mistaken as to the religious condition of England. The most chimerical notions prevailed in the Vatican. To the eyes of Papal enthusiasm the whole English nation was only waiting for some word in season to return to the spiritual jurisdiction of Rome. The Pope had not been fortunate in many things. He had been a fugitive from his own city, and had been restored only by the force of French arms. He was a thoroughly good, pious, and genial man, not seeing far into the various ways of human thought and national character; and to his mind there was nothing unreasonable in the idea that Heaven might have made up for the domestic disasters of his reign by making him the instrument of the conversion of England. No better proof can be given of the manner in which he and his advisers misunderstood the English people than the step with which his sanguine zeal inspired him. The English people, even while they yet bowed to the spiritual supremacy of the Papacy, were always keenly jealous of any ecclesiastical attempt to control the political action or restrict the national independence of England. The history of the relations between England and Rome, for long generations before England had any thought of re