unite in resistance, showed.* Where such a spirit reigned, it was surely impolitic in England to force on them a measure which, under the circumstances, could not be carried out. The colonists perceived that the stamp act tended to hamper their commercial transactions, and saw that it could easily be rendered nugatory. Sanctioned by their religion, they probably considered opposition to England as a duty; and favoured as they were by a large party in Great Britain, they readily perceived that their opposition, whether lawful or not, would without doubt be successful if steadily persevered in. Perhaps it would have been better for all parties if the repeal of the stamp act had not been followed by attempts to impose taxes upon "glass, tea, paper, and painters' colours." The burning of the Gaspee schooner at Providence, and the systematic destruction of the East India Company's teas at Boston, roused a fierce enthusiasm. England lost her colonies, and the strife which, if unsuccessful, would have been stigmatised as the AMERICAN REBELLION, was called the WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.

The Dutch,† breaking the law of neutrality, assisted the insurgents; the chivalry of France plunged into the unnatural war; the great powers of Europe smiled on the upstart offspring, glad that the proud parent should be humbled; and the baffled lion retreated to his native rock, and wondered at the cubs he had reared!

To whom shall the guilt of that war be imputed? To the rebellious child, or to the unreasonable parent? Time alone can answer the question. But this much we know the part which one European nation took in the transaction, brought down a heavy retribution on her own head: the principles she had encouraged and applauded in the New World, were practically applied to herself in the Old; and the ancient monarchy of France, blinded by the flatteries of a false philosophy, fell to the dust in blood and tears, and rose up again the scourge of the world, under "THE CHILD AND CHAMPION OF DEMOCRACY !" National levity carried the French

into the greatest extremes for some years previous to the Revolution. The following anecdote may be considered "apropos:""The influenza spread about this time, and that also, was converted into a fashionable dress. The hats and bonnets of the frivolous Parisians were all influenzas. The Count de Vergennes, in a conversation, was describing the singularity of this epidemic disorder, and said it was called 'le mal Russe,' because it first appeared at Petersburgh. • We are

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threatened,' observed a Duchess present, with another malady, which will come from America. What is that, madam,' interrupted Vergennes. The INDEPENDENZA,' replied the fair Cassandra. I am informed that our troops in that country are delighted in finding that every soldier may hope to become a general, if he shows any talents for war; that the Americans acknowledge no distinctions of nobility and rank, and that all men are equal. This infinitely pleases the French, and on their return home they will dwell with rapture on these events; they will tell their friends and relations all they have seen, and in what manner men become independent; they will teach men what they have learnt there. The Count de Vergennes was greatly surprised and embarrassed at this effusion. This minister had formerly persuaded himself that the separation of the colonies from the mother country, and the war of France, would ever after have a fatal influence on the future existence of England.”—Domestic Anecdotes.

Did the Lion of England bend before that impersonation of the spirit he had battled with in America ? Did he crouch and tremble at the despot's name? Did he whine for mercy, and prostrate himself at the feet of the tyrant? No! He rose from his lair, and lashed himself into a rage; the sound of a thousand guns was in his roar as he sprang upon the foe. He chased him from the sea, and he tore him on the land; and in the territory of that power which had once violated the law of neutrality, he felled his enemy to the earth.

FOR upwards of sixty years has France exhibited to the world the spectacle of a phantasmagoria—wild, fitful, and incoherent as a nightmare-dream. The horrible and the pathetic mingled with the grotesque; things incongruous and unexpected succeeding each other with transformations as rapid as legerdemain; massacres and festivals; miseries and orgies; reckless license and stringent despotism; strange visions of murdered sovereigns, and ephemeral consuls and dictators. Dynasties changing like the slides in a magiclantern; an emperor rising from the chaos of revolution, as from a surging sea; sinking, re-appearing, then again sinking. A long-guarded captive seating himself on the throne of his captor; a Republic with the anomaly of Equality for its motto, and a Prince-President at its head; and Absolutism established in honour of Liberty and Fraternity.

Party colours glance on the sight like the tints of a quick-shaken kaleidoscope; the white of the Bourbon lilies, and the blue of the Napoleon violets; imperial purple, tri-coloured cockades, and Red Republicanism. Another

shake of the kaleidoscope, and again the purple predominates. But the present resumé of the empire has not the prestige of its original, whose birth was heralded by glittering trophies, and the exciting strains of martial music. No! Here is an empire created by slight of hand amid no prouder minstrelsy than that of the violins of fêtes.

With a new slide of the magic-lantern we behold an imperial wedding, surpassing in brilliant externals even the nuptials of the Napoleon and Maria

VOL. XLI.—NO. CCXLIII.

Louisa. But the bridegroom is not Napoleon the Great, nor is the bride a daughter of the Cæsars. We must give the bridegroom due credit for proving that he still possesses some freshness of feeling, not yet wholly seared by coups d'etat and diplomacy, and that he amiably prefers (for the time, at least) domestic affection to self-interest and expediency. But how long will he be permitted by the most changeable, the most uncertain people on earth, to enjoy his love-match in peace? With the populace it may be acceptable, so long as it gives them pageants to "assist" at, to gaze upon, and to talk about; but the alliance of an emperor of France with a Spanish countess, the subject of another sovereign, is not glorious enough for the other classes, who are really aristocratic in their hearts, notwithstanding occasionally short freaks of democracy. Republican governments have never governed the French; they are only impressed by the opposites of democracy, by the prestige of rank, titles, and distinction. Louis XIV., a far more mighty sovereign than Napoleon III., and who, on his firmly established throne, was servilely worshipped as the "Grand Monarque," never dared to avow his clandestine marriage with Madame de Maintenon. Napoleon I. showed how well he understood the genius of the French people, when he replaced his really beloved Josephine by the daughter of an emperor, and required his brother Jerome to put away his first wife, Miss Patterson, for a German princess.

Louis Napoleon himself seems to have had his misgivings as to the effect the step he contemplated would

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have on the mind of the nation; and the fall of the French funds, from the time the marriage came on the tapis, was full of significance. Instead of following the usual example of monarchs, and simply announcing his intended marriage, he proceeded to make his notification a piece justificative, full of explanations and apologies, in which his anxiety betrayed him into inconsistencies and errors of judgment. At variance with his hereditary pretensions as Napoleon III., he rejoiced in the character of parvenu, and then boasted the "high birth' of his consort. He endeavoured to frame his speech, as though he had taken for his text Ovid's maxim

"

"Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur Majestas et Amor."

-Metam. lib. ii, 846.

Yet he has laboured to overload love with the most far-fetched and dazzling majesty. He complacently instanced his grandmother, Josephine, as beloved by France, though not of royal blood; seemingly oblivious that Napoleon I. had not stooped from the throne to raise her (she had been his wife ere men dreamed of him as a monarch)— and that his policy soon compelled her to descend from the throne, and give place to a prouder bride. Louis Napoleon has promised that the Empress Eugenia will revive the virtues of the Empress Josephine: far wiser had he not touched on the topic, to remind his bride that the reward-the earthly reward of those virtues was divorce and a broken heart; and to remind his people how easily the non-royal wife could be moved aside, whenever the interests of the crown or the nation should require it. He who has declared that the empire is peace,' has dropped ominous words of "the hour of danger," in which the good qualities of his Eugenia will shine forth; in contrast, he evidently meant, with the incapacity and selfishness of Maria Louisa, when France was invaded by the allies; but how utterly distasteful to the French public must that ill-judged reminder be!

He spoke, in his ante-nuptial speech, of the unhappy fates of the illustrious ladies who had worn the crown of France-a suggestive theme, in which we are about to follow his lead; but from his lips the subject seemed peculiarly ill-chosen and ill-timed. Verily, his Imperial Majesty has been singu.

larly infelicitous in his selection of topics. In every country of Europe there are still men whose hearts can respond to the sentiment—

"Dulce et decorum est PRO PATRIA mori."-Hor. Such men would have esteemed it more judicious to have avoided any mention of the deceased father of Eugenia de Montijo, than to have announced him as one who, in the struggle of Spain for independence, fought against his own countrymen, and with the invaders of his native land. The unnecessary allusion to the bereaved Duchess of Orleans is in such bad taste, that to comment on it would be a continuation of the fault.

But we must excuse the inconsistencies of a man too much in love to see the import of all he said: and we must not, in common courtesy, omit for his bride the customary compliment to all brides, the expression of our good wishes. We wish her happiness, and the more willingly for the sake of the good blood in her veins-the blood of worthy, sagacious, and patriotic Scotland (derived, not from her father, but from her mother, a Kirkpatrick). May the " canny drop" be allowed free circulation through her heart! Yes, we wish her happiness willingly, but very doubtfully; not because she has wedded a Buonaparte, for the men of that name have not the reputation of unkind husbands (even to the wives they repudiated), and she might be very happy with Louis Napoleon in another sphere; not merely because her position is trying, and apparently insecure, but because she places on her head the crown matrimonial of France-a circlet with which some dark fatality seems connected: for, among the many fair brows on which it has rested, there are very few that it has left without a blight or a wound.

When our memory passes in review the royal and imperial wives of France, we are surprised to see how many have been divorced, how many brokenhearted, how many have left a disgraceful name behind to posterity. And among the smaller number, the innocent and the happy, how many have been snatched away by a premature death, or have been early and sadly widowed. The crown matrimonial of France has been borne, by the majority of its wearers, unworthily, unhappily, or too briefly. For some it