of the king for the suspected, should be hanged on the spot. Thus I think we may conclude, that the Ultra-Monarchist and the Ultra-Jacobin are pretty much the same sort of animal in France, and that they transfer, with equal alacrity and a zeal equally enlightened, the republican to the scaffold and the royalist to the guillotine.

The wounds which the several branches of the Guise family inflicted on France may have been healed by time, but the stain of moral turpitude that they imprinted has been very lasting. For a state, in the infancy of its greatness, in which civilization was struggling through the incrustations of prejudice, to fall into such hands, was an unspeakable calamity; and how so sensible a man as Mably, after reviewing the infamous conspiracies they hatched, and the butcheries they executed; after observing that the government would have ceased to have been despotic if the base ambition of the Duc de Guise had not prevented the grant of the demand of the States General of Blois, under Henry III.—after even asserting that if the Guises had existed under Louis XIII. the horrors of the league would have been acted over again; how, after all this, he could let slip the following palliation of their crimes, I cannot imagine. "Retranchez les Guises de notre histoire et vous n'y verrez ni moins de desordres, ni moins de guerres civiles."

From these disgusting recollections of depravity and vice, over which the imagination grows weary and the heart sickens, we may turn with pleasure to the opening of the seventeenth century.— It was then that the sceptre of France fell by accident to a young hero, replete with the charms of humanity and justice, whose short but eventful life was a continual struggle against the fanaticism, cupidity and thirst of blood, which the most wicked of all governments had transfused into the French character. There is indeed something so recreating in the prospect of Henry IV. devoting his gallant life in the field in the cause of justice or toleration; giving his hours to the study of plans for the improvement of his people, and his leisure moments to the elegant fascinations of gallantry, that I often find myself ready to join this grateful people in the excess of enthusiasm with which they recal and applaud his virtues. And why should they not? They who have so little that is purely what it should be in their

history, is it no proof of their goodly nature to dwell with elation and vanity on its most delightful era? The sweetness of Henry's administration touched the hearts of his subjects, whilst the parental solicitude and vigour with which he watched over the state, and converted the angry spirit of faction into the zeal of allegiance, excited the admiration of foreigners. The tendency of the kingdom to fall asunder again into baronial fiefs (arising from the independent operations of the nobles during the civil wars,) being now no longer augmented by the dangerous ambition of the house of Guise, went on diminishing every day, till the presumptuous conspiracy of Marshal Biron led to that spilling of his blood, which cemented the whole kingdom into one compact body.

To Henry IV. France owes all her greatness; and if her fanaticism had suffered him to live, and to follow the dictates of Sully's understanding, he might have effected the entire reform of her moral character. But the ignorance of the age caused the titles of liberator and restorer of France, of which he was so ambitious, to be misunderstood; and it was left for time to develop, and for succeeding ages to admire the greatness of his plans.

Henry found the finances of France in so deplorable a state, that of one hundred and fifty millions of livres paid by the people, twenty-five millions only reached the royal treasury. He reformed these abuses, and to ease the burthens of the nation, suppressed, as fast as the prejudices of the public would permit him, those brevetted titles of nobility, or tickets of exemption from taxation, and those sinecures which the venal folly of his predecessors had incorporated into the administration of the government. He introduced that order, regularity, and discipline into the army, which afterwards secured such brilliant triumphs to the French arms under Turenne and Condè. The encouragement he gave to industry, combined with the activity of his po. lice, nearly destroyed the numerous bands of roving brigands that had hitherto interrupted the intercourse between the provinces and plundered travellers on the highways with a sort of licensed impunity. The effect of his solicitude for the encouragement of agriculture was so great, that the price of land was doubled and the number of cattle quadrupled in France in fifteen years: whilst

the country, which he had found in a state of beggarly starvation, was not only abundantly relieved, but became a granary for foreign exportation. Many parts of France, when he came to the throne, lay waste for the want of roads and canals, but he and his great minister were so sensible of the utility of these engines of civilization, that even at the fall of the monarchy, after the lapse of near two centuries, there scarcely existed any thing of the kind in France which was not either commenced or planned by them. The Seine and the Loire were united, and the canal of Languedoc, the great good work of Louis XIV. proposed; whilst various roads wound themselves in every direction over the face of the country. Nor were his roads like those of his successors, mere highways of ostentation, in the enormous width of which there is land enough uselessly condemned to support the labourers necessary to keep them in repair. He erected new palaces, and embellished those which already existed; raised up colleges for the education of youth, and built hospitals to shelter those who had gallantly defended their country, or who were sinking into the infirmities of decrepitude. The Duke of Sully, in fact, was the first statesman who laid hold on the clue, which being followed up by later philosophers, has led to the centre of the abstruse labyrinth of political economy; and revealed the beautiful simplicity of a system, whose entanglements were formerly imagined to be too intricate for comprehension. It was the policy of that great minister to liberalize the public mind, and with this view he established libraries, universities, museums, and botanical gardens, so that before the end of his administration, the genius of civilization arose in France, and "o'er the dark scene her silver mantle threw." In short, almost all the great works of utility or embellishment which were executed in this kingdom in the seventeenth century were the offspring of his genius, although the pompous parade with which many of them were carried into effect by Louis XIV. occasioned a temporary forgetfulness of their origin, and robbed their author like Columbus, for a time, of his true reputation.

But however much we may be disposed to admire the plans of Henry and Sully for the improvement and decoration of France, they all yield in sublimity to the noble war they waged against the prevailing vices of the age--to that pure benevolence

and spirit of enlightened toleration with which they attempted to subdue the angry factious spirit which fifty years of trouble and fanaticism had irritated and matured. It is somewhat remarkable that civil wars in the nations of modern Europe have, in spite of the immediate injury they inflicted, been almost invariably the causes of much improvement in the end. Thus when the religious wars were over in France, and when the energy they awakened had been directed a few years by a wise government, nothing prevented France from acquiring an entire ascendancy in Europe but the death of Henry The re-organization of a government after its dissolution usually places it more in harmony with the spirit of the age; and in France the very opposite doctrines which were then preached with great vehemence smoothed in the end the asperities of prejudice. Had the Ligue accomplished its purpose the power of France might have been at this day on a level with that of Italy or Spain, for at that time the Spanish monarchy was more powerful and held a more imposing attitude in Europe than that of France. But the latter after being torn to pieces by religious factions, became enlightened by toleration, and fell under the dominion of a hero, whilst the former was hushed asleep in the arms of a bigotted monster, better calculated to calumniate than to civilize mankind. Whilst Henry full of glory and the projects of honourable reform was arranging the foundations of a splendid kingdom, Philip was putting down the spirit of independence by the unanswerable arguments of the sword and the gibbet-was extinguishing the spirit of reform in the damps of the inquisition and lulling the pangs of his conscience by a reverential submission to the casuistry of his confessor.

Before the reign of Henry IV. the French nobles were a rough martial race of men living in castles surrounded by ditches, and who, though full of activity in the agitation of war, slumbered away existence in the tranquillity of peace. The ecclesiastical corps, though animated by the zeal of intolerance, were dissolutely free in their morals, and prone to perpetuate ignorance, whilst the great mass of the people lived in a state of misery and insignificance almost on a level with the brute creation. To remedy these evils Henry encouraged the nobles to reside in the

country, and impressed them with the belief that the good management of their estates was a surer road to fortune than an obsequious dangling at the heels of the monarch. He taught them by his example to live simply; to cultivate an acquaintance with their tenantry; to instruct them in agriculture and to soften as far as possible the severity of their condition.

But however much the beneficent administration of Henry did to abate the ferocity of national manners it lasted too short a time to effect an entire moral revolution in the kingdom. On the contrary a variety of circumstances prove how far the French were from being entirely humanized before his death. The many attempts on the life of this pattern of kingly excellence; the sanguinary phlegm with which the court probably destroyed him at last; the licentious disorders that were perpetually breaking out over the kingdom in spite of his good government, and the fact that the theatres were obliged to open at two o'clock, in order not only to avoid the mud in the streets, but the assassins that prowled through them during the darkness of the night, are sufficient, I think, to warrant the assertion that the beginning of the seventeenth century was not the golden age of morality in France, and that she was not even during this blossoming period of the olden time, in any degree happier or better than she is at present.

I have already suggested that the spectacle of political grandeur, which modern Europe offers to our regards, was unfolding itself at that time, and that it was the impetus which France derived from her civil wars and from Henry's genius that carried her prosperity so high and enabled her to take the lead among modern nations. The pleasing influence of Henry's character in smoothing the asperities of ruder manners by the refinements of gallantry, and in sweetening the bonds of social intercourse by gayety and politeness, is yet discernable in France after the lapse of so many ages. I may hereafter have occasion also to point out how much the liberty of conscience he established in this country promoted its prosperity, and how soon the loss of it led to the decay both of private morality and national grandeur; for although the singular coincidence may never have been observed, it is unquestionably true, that the sun of French glory during her monarchy seems to have risen on the publication of