single example, in the course of ele ven months there were thirty-seven prefects nominated to the depart ments, and the list did not compre hend a single one of those emigrants who returned to France with Louis; and but very few of those whose exile had terminated more early. The nobles felt this exclusion from royal favour, and expressed their complaints, which some, yet more imprudently, mingled with threats, that their day of triumph might yet arrive. This language, as well as the air of exclusive dignity and distance which they affected, as if the distinction of their birth was all that they had left to them, was carefully remarked and recorded against the king. Yet it was not in the saloons or anti-chambers of Louis that these imprudent speeches were heard. But the nobles who attended on Monsieur and his sons, the Dukes of Angouleme and Berri, permitted themselves greater licence. These princes were supposed to be the chiefs of the roy alist party, and as such were held to be indisposed to the popular cause and national charter. Monsieur himself, and his eldest son, the Duke of Angouleme, were represented as being under the influence of the dig nified clergy, and the high-born aris tocrats. The Duke of Berri, with a more marked character than his father or brother, was still less popular. He imitated the hot and violent manners of Buonaparte towards the sol diers and people, without recollecting that that person had arbitra ry sway both over the persons and minds of those whom he insulted. The following is one of the most pardonable instances of his extravagance. He reviewed two regiments, one of which shouted Vive le Roi, the other was silent. "What!" said the Duke of Berri to the officers of the latter corps; "it seems you have not taught your men that cry, so dear to France? If you love your emperor, support him

openly, and I will charge you at the head of the regiment which cried Vive le Roi." Such a challenge could only pass as a cheap yet insulting bravado in the eyes of those to whom it was given, but by whom it could not be accepted. The king was frequently called upon to repair errors committed by this impetuous young man; of which he was doomed, nevertheless, to expiate the consequences and incur the odium. This happened on one occasion, when the Duke de Berri, in a frenzy of passion, tore the epaulet from the coat of a subaltern, who had served long and with reputation. The king, from policy alike and good nature, soothed the wounded feelings of the officer, by giving him instant promotion, and assuring him that the duke's violence only meant that one epaulet was misplaced on the person of one so well deserving to wear two, to which he now gave him the right. Upon the whole, however, the conduct of the king's near kinsmen was imprudent and unpopular; and they excited jealousy, by holding themselves out as chiefs of that party who affected to be better royalists than the king himself. In this as upon other occasions, the members of the king's family imitated too much the manners previous to the Revolution, when it was customary for the princes of the blood to head their own separate parties, in opposition to the reigning monarch. The divisions of the house of Bourbon had more than once brought it within a hair's-breadth of ruin at earlier periods of history, and had contributed not a little to its temporary downfall in 1792. And yet, untaught by experience so dearly bought, the princes were supposed to separate their views and their interest from that of the king, at a time when the united strength of the whole family was scarce likely to secure the permanence of the monarchy.

The state of the clergy falls under

our view of the royal party. They were sincerely attached to the king, and had they been in possession of their revenues and of their natural influence upon the public mind, their attachment would have been of the utmost consequence. But without this influence, and without the wealth, or at least the independence, on which it partly rests, they were as useless, politically speaking, as a key which does not fit the lock to which it is applied. This state of things, unfortunate in many respects, flowed from a maxim adopted during the revolution, and followed by Buonaparte, who had his reasons for fearing the influence of the clergy. "We will not put down the ecclesiastical establishment by force; we will starve it to death." Accordingly all grants and bequests to the church had been so limited and qualified by so many conditions and restrictions, as to in tercept that mode of acquisition so fruitful in a catholic country; while, on the other hand, the salary allowed by the state to each officiating curate was only five hundred livres (267. 16s. 8d.) yearly. No doubt each community were permitted to subscribe what they pleased in addition to this miserable pittance; but in France, when the number of those who care for no religion at all, and of those whose zeal will not lead them the length of paying for it, is deduced, the remainder will afford but a small list of subscribers. With such encouragement, few young men have within the last twenty years been educated for the church; and it is only the zeal of a few religious persons, which maintains at the seminaries as objects of charity some halfstarved students of divinity. These, inured to indigence, and accustomed to dependence, are all to whom the church can trust for reforming the morals of the people, and the spirit of the age. The consequence is, that as

very many parishes are now, and have been for years, without any public worship, ignorance has increased in an incalculable degree. "We are informed," was the communication from Buonaparte to one of his prefects," that dangerous books are distributed in your department.". "Were the roads sown with them," was the answer returned by the prefect, "your majesty need not fear their influence; we have not a man who could or would read them."When we add to this the relaxed state of public morals, the pains taken in the beginning of the revolution to eradicate the sentiments of religion, and render its professors ridiculous, and the prevalence of the military character, so conspicuous through France, and so unfavourable to devotion; and when it is further remembered that all the wealth of the church has fallen into the hands of the laity, which are fast clenched to retain it, and trembling at the same time lest it be wrested from them, the reader may, from all these causes, form some notion of the low ebb of religion in France.

The disposition of the king and royal family to restore the formal observances of the Romish church, as well as to provide the suitable means of educa ting in future those designed for the ministry, and other religious institutions, excited among the Parisians a feeling of loathing and contempt. It must be owned also, that though the abstract motive was excellent, there was little wisdom in attempting to bring back the nation to all those mummeries of popish ceremonial, which, long before the revolution, only subsisted through inveterate custom, having lost all influence on the public mind. After an interval of twenty years, and to the eyes of a dissolute populace equally void of religion and superstition, and of a youth trained up in arms, and in ignorance

tolerance.

It is well known, that by a rule unworthy equally of christianity and civilization, theatrical performers are in a state of constant excommunication by the catholic church. Upon this ground, the reliques of Moliere were refused christian burial by an Archbishop of Paris, himself famous for licentious gallantry. And when, at the personal entreaty of the king himself, the honour of a grave in hal lowed ground was permitted to a man of the brightest genius that ever adorned France, the mob, instigated by the curate of Saint Eustace, attacked the funeral procession; and the widow of the poet could only purchase his reliques a quiet passage to the grave, by scattering money among the rabble who assembled to insult them. The church of Rome, whose motto is Vestigia nulla retrorsum, retains to this day the same mark of barbarism. In the year 1802, the curate of Saint Roche, under the reign of Buonaparte, refused the rites of burial to a female performer at the opera, and a considerable tumult ensued in consequence. But on the

17th of January, 1815, a much more serious commotion took place upon the same subject. The remains of Mademoiselle Raucour, an actress, a woman of decent character and morals, were brought for interment to the church of St Roche, in the Rue St Honoré. The gates of the church were found locked, and all admittance was refused. An immense crowd began to assemble, with exclamations of fury and indignation. A deputation was sent to the king to solicit his interference, which was refused, with the excuse, that his majesty could not interpose in matters of spiritual jurisdiction. The tumult increased, and it seemed as if it might have effects different from, and extending far beyond the cause which had produced it. The doors of the church were forced open by the populace; and a second deputation sent to the king, and accompanied with a declaration, on the part of the theatrical performers of every class, that they were determined to become Lutherans or Calvinists, if the honours of sepulture were denied to them by the Catholic church, procured, or rather extorted an order from the king to the priesthood, to pronounce the service over the body. Mademoiselle Raucour was accordingly interred; but, as was alleged, "with maimed rites," amid shouts of a bas les Calottes-a bas la cagoterie, &c. The incident was considered as a triumph of the popular party over the clergy, and even over the king; and the feeling was far from ending with the cause by which it had been excited.

The solemn obsequies of Louis XVI. and his unfortunate queen, although they excited no tumult, produced a deep and unfavourable impressiou on the public mind. The remains of these innocent victims to the fury and crimes of the revolution were raised from the hasty grave to which their

murderers had consigned them, and transferred, in solemn pomp, to the royal sepulchre in the church of St Denis. There was, perhaps, more fraternal feeling than policy in this measure. The singular contrast between the characters and history of some of the mourners, and the office which they were called upon to perform, did not escape the watchful ridicule of the Parisians. Barthelemy, once a member of the republican Directory, now a vice-president of the Chamber of Peers; and Soult, another child of the revolution, seemed strangely se lected as pall-bearers over the corpse of the monarch, to whose fall and death they owed all their honours. The troops called out to form part of the procession resented it as Cromwell's battalions would have resented a summonsto attend the obsequies of Charles, whom they had guarded to execu, tion. But the ceremony was ill judged, chiefly because it was capable of being misrepresented to the people as a public mark of the king's hostility to every thing connected with the revolution; and his alleged purpose of remembering, and at fit times revenging, the wrongs of his deceased brother. At all events, it was quoted as a proof of his intolerable bigotry and attachment to the clergy, their doctrines, rules, and opinions.

It may be doubtful, however, whether any of the causes which we have noticed, rendered the trust reposed by Louis XVIII. in his clergy, and the respect which he paid to the rules of the church, so much the object of popular jealousy, as the fear that he would be ultimately prevailed upon to make some attempt to resume the lands, of which the spiritual orders had been deprived by the revolution. It has often been noticed, that the grants of church-lands to the laity, at the time of the Reformation, made the soundest and most zealous protes

tants; and that there were few instances of those who received them relapsing into the errors of popery. The domains of the church, assumed in property by the National Assembly, and sold to individuals, formed in France a host of proprietors, equally jealous of the reviving influence of the clergy, at whose expence they had been enriched, as the reformed nobles of England, who had divided the spoils of the church in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. These men remembered that the canons declared even the Pope himself incompe tent to confirm the alienation of church-lands, without the consent of a council of the church; and that the council of Trent had solemnly anathematized all who detained such property from their spiritual owners. They watched with alarm incipient measures towards resumption, or at least composition, for such property, which the churchmen obtained by alarming the ductile consciences of some proprietors of national domains, and the more accessible fears of others. Imprudent priests added to this distrust and jealousy, by denunciations against those who held church-lands, and by refusing to grant them absolution, without they made restitution or compensation for them. This distrust spread far wider than the proprietors of national domains. For if these, were threatened with resumption of the property they had acquired under authority of the existing go, vernment for the time, it was most probable that the divine right of the clergy to a tithe of the produce of the earth might next have been brought forward, a claim involving the interest of every landholder and farmer in France to a degree almost incalculable. Distrust was thus wide. ly circulated through the kingdom; and the violence, or imprudent zeal and egotism of every royalist, whether

noble or church-man, had its separate effect in rendering Louis and his government suspected and unpopular.

The royal party yet counted a third set of adherents, in the brave inhabitants of La Vendee and Britany, and their gallant leaders, with the descendants of such as had fallen in the royal cause. Sapineau, the surviving companion of Charette, La RocheJaquelin, and Bouchamp, headed a deputation from La Vendee, composed of veteran officers, covered with honourable scars, who, through the long period of twenty years adversi ty, had never ceased to give the strongest proofs of unconquerable courage and devoted constancy to the family of Bourbon. The king was much affected at receiving their homage, confirmed to them the rank which they held in the royal Vendean army, and granted them the decorations of the Lily and of St Louis. These natural and yet cautious marks of favour to the only departments of France which had shewn themselves actually animated by a zeal for the Bourbon family, were jealously regarded by the Jacobins and by the army, both of whom had found in the untaught but indomitable courage of La Vendee, more effectual resistance than from the disciplined ranks of their foreign ene mies. They raised a yet louder outcry when the king granted letters of nobility to the brother of Georges Cadoudal, the intended assassin of Buonaparte, who perished in the Temple. And, upon the whole, this class of royalists erred, as well as others, by keeping themselves, and their pretensions to favour, of a nature so unpopular to the bulk of the nation, too much in the public eye. For it was a natural and fatal inference, if the services of these men have merited the

VOL VIII. PART II.

royal favour, what have they deserved whose conduct was diametrically" opposite?

While the royalists made these false movements, and thus rather sapped and encumbered than supported the throne to which they adhered, their errors were carefully pointed out, circulated, and exaggerated, by the JACOBIN, or, as they called themselves, the Patriotic Party. This faction, small in numbers, but formidable from their audacity, their union, and the dreadful recollection of their former power and principles, consisted of ex-generals, whose laurels had faded with the republic; ex-ministers and functionaries, whose appointments and influence had not survived the downfall of the Directory; men of letters, who hoped again to rule the state by means of proclamations and journals; and philosophers, to whose vanity or enthusiasm abstract principles of unattainable liberty, and undesirable equality, were dearer than all the oceans of blood, and extent of guilt and misery, that they had already cost, and were likely again to occasion. The chiefs of this party were men of that presumptuous and undoubting class, who, after having failed repeatedly in political experiments, were as ready as ever again to undertake them, with the same unhesitating and self-deceptive confidence of success. They were familiarized with, and hardened to the dangers of the most desperate revolutionary intrigues, by their familiar acquaintance with the springs which set each in motion, and were ready to recommence their perilous labours with as little forethought as the labourersin a powder-mill, which has exploded ten times during their remembrance. In the character of these self-entitled philosophers, and busy agitators, vanity,as well as egotism, are leading prin