and papers, were all just as they had been left. A female friend of M. Guizot's accompanied M. Lamartine in his inspection; and he consigned to her care the private papers and a small sum in gold that remained on the premises. On examining the political papers left by the minister on the table, he perceived his own name. Curiosity led him to read the passage. It was a note taken by M. Guizot for his last address to the Chambers, and contained these words "The more I listen to M. de Lamartine, the more I feel that we shall never be able to agree!"

Lamartine spent the first night at the ministry of foreign affairs in considering the attitude which the French republic should assume with regard to Europe; and the result, he tells us, was, that an alliance with Russia should be brought about, by the cession to that power of Constantinople, the Black Sea, the Dardanelles, and the Adriatic. Italy, Belgium, the Rhine, and Spain, would be assured to France, at the same time that Austria and Prussia would be crushed between the two! There would thus be only two nations in Europe; and Great Britain would, to use the minister's own words, be cast off as a mere satellite in the ocean! These views were certainly poetically comprehensive; whether practical, we must leave to be determined by those admirers of Lamartine who carried him expressions of sympathy and adhesion, even at the time when their hero, with peace and fraternity on his lips, was spurning their country as fit only for the oceanic depths, and mentally exclaiming, "The Russian alliance is the cry of nature: it is the revelation of geography: it is the alliance of war, for the eventualities of the future, to the two great races!"

To bring about this final change in the balance of power, instead of proceeding openly, Lamartine tells us his instructions to the ambassadors were, to await upon England with dignity, to conciliate Prussia, to observe Russia, to calm Poland, to caress Germany, to avoid Austria, to smile upon Italy, to re-assure Turkey (previously to giving it over to Russia), and to abandon Spain to itself. The world will see, by these amusing confessions, what trust is to be placed in the attitude taken by a French Republic. These dreams of ambition, veiled by generalities of peace and fraternity, were followed by the celebrated manifesto, which, according to its author, "gave to democracy its verb, to war its signification, and to peace its dignity." An army of observation of from 15,000 to 20,000 men was decreed for the Pyrenees: another, of 62,000 men, was ordered to the Alps. Lamoricière, Oudinot, and Bedeau, accepted commands; but a quarrel took place between the first-mentioned general and Lamartine on the question of withdrawing 50,000 men from the 100,000 protecting a desert in Africa, and on which question Lamartine was left in a minority. Deprived of this aid at home, the minister advocated the levying of 300 battalions of Gardes Mobiles. such a measure the army, which on the 1st of March was composed of an effective force of 370,000 men, would be carried to 580,000. General Subervie and M. Arago laboured so assiduously at this vast augmentation of the armed force of France, that by the 1st of June it had been raised to an effective army of 400,000 men, and before the end of the year to upwards of 500,000. And this was independent of the Garde Mobile and Republicaine in Paris, which were composed of about 20,000 excellent soldiers, under the command of Generals Duvivier and Damesne.

By

Such efforts, however, necessitated an expenditure to which the public treasury did not respond with the alacrity usually exhibited by every

"Revo

Frenchman where military power and glory are concerned. lutions," says M. Lamartine, "are the eclipses of credit, because they shake not only interests but imaginations." The dogmas of Louis Blanc upon equalising the salaries of workmen, unequal in force, in skill, and in good conduct, Lamartine assures us amused, but never convinced the public. "He was," he avouches, "the O'Connell of workmen ; prodigal of empty words, full of promises of impossibilities, and putting off the results to those who could not put off their wants." The resignation of M. Goudchaux brought a climax to the financial crisis. Lamartine takes credit for being the only one who spoke in the language of hope and courage in the presence of such a calamity. Garnier Pagés accepted the burthen and saved the treasury, as he also by the same act saved the republic.

M. de Lamartine gives some curious details how, in the hurry of business and ill-defined responsibilities, many decrees were issued which he at present repudiates. Such, for example, was the decree abolishing titles, as also the decree ordering the arrest and trial of the fugitive ministry. It is needless to enter into the circumstantial details given at length by M. de Lamartine of the flight of the different members of the royal family and of the ministers. Upon such subjects the author, however well informed, could only be so at second hand. The want of intimacy with the commonest geographical details, which any schoolboy could have corrected, is amusingly manifest when he relates that the ship carried the ex-king across a terrible sea to Southampton, where the hospitality of his sonin-law, the King of the Belgians, awaited him in his regal mansion of Claremont! Louis Philippe, we need scarcely say, landed at Newhaven.*

In reference to the flight of the Duchess of Orleans, M. de Mornay has corrected M. de Lamartine upon several points, more particularly the supposed disloyal conduct of Marshal Molitor at the Invalides; the change of dress and name; and still more particularly the statement, that, when at Lille, the duchess entertained the idea of showing herself to the troops, and vindicating her son's right to the throne. M. de Mornay relates that the princess did not even pass the night in that city; that she remained at the terminus station without leaving the carriage, and saw no one; and that no proceeding or indication on her part could warrant the remark that she had an idea of appealing to the sympathies of the garrison and its officers, or of claiming the throne for her son.

The crowning plan of Garnier Pagés's financial system, Lamartine informs us, was the buying in of the great lines of railroad by the state. Lamartine says he abetted this measure with all his influence, and that its failure was the greatest fault committed by that minister; and yet he, the poetical and transcendental republican, avows that such a treaty between the companies and the state was only possible under a dictatorial government!

The ambition of the African generals, officers of the young army, did not fail in soon having effect with the Provisional Government. The first sacrifice made was that of the minister of war, General Subervie, who was, for the time being, succeeded by Arago. While under the auspices of the astronomer royal-more versed, it might be supposed, in

It was only the other day that we stopped at the Bridge Inn at Newhaven, where the ex-King of the French found refuge on landing in England. A most comfortable hostel it is, and Mrs. Smith is the tidiest of landladies. The "king's room" is a perfect conservatory. We recommend our Brighton friends to pay Mrs. Smith a visit.

the movements of celestial bodies than of armed masses-the African generals laboured at the re-organisation of the army. The other members of government had to struggle with a still more formidable crisis, that of the national ateliers. Lamartine acknowledges that a great campaign in the interior, with tools for arms, after the examples of the great campaigns of the Egyptians and Romans, to construct pyramids or dig canals, was one of the great ideas of the hour. The organisations of these ateliers led, however, at once to the formation of a pretorian guard; which, although it scandalised Paris, Lamartine says defended government, till the meeting of the National Assembly, against the Clubs and Red Republicans. Government did not see the evil that would ensue from 20,000 workmen supported by the public funds. The number was soon increased to 100,000, by recruits from every branch of business and employment, even to actors and literary men; and it would have required another army to disperse them, or expel them from the capital. With strange inconsistency, Lamartine denies that this organisation was a system, and yet he avers that this pretorian army protected and saved Paris several times without the circumstances being known.

With the progress of time, new difficulties also arose within the bosom of government itself. Each minister was a sovereign in his own centre of action; and Louis Blanc and Albert, attached to the party of the Réforme, united themselves with the more active partisans among the Socialists, to give precedence to their doctrines. Flocon wavered between the pretensions of the Socialists and those of the Ultra-Republicans. Caussidière pretended to incline towards the policy of the government, but in reality he only sought to increase his own importance. Lamartine admits that he supported the ambitious requests of this dangerous demagogue, as it was necessary to oppose him to still more dangerous enemies. Caussidière had his good points; he despised the humbug of the Socialists, and he exerted himself to the utmost to restrain the republican propagandism of the Polish, Belgian, German, and Italian refugees, who would have raised up all Europe against the republic.

The minister of the interior, M. Ledru Rollin, received great assistance from the literary talents of Madame Dudevant (George Sand), and the oratorical abilities of M. Jules Favre. Lamartine says that he himself did every thing he could to win over the celebrated romancist to the repudiation of crimes and excesses of all kinds. She promised at first; but, carried away by early predilections, her whole talents were thrown, in the official paper called the Bulletin de la République, into the scale of incendiary doctrines; she advocated Socialism and Communism, and revived the memory of the crimes and terrors of the first revolution. The majority of the government were grievously annoyed that words and doctrines so totally opposed to the opinions which they really entertained should go forth, as if sanctioned by them, to the departments and the public: a kind of censorship was attempted to be established over the erratic talent of the evil genius of Madame Dudevant. But Lamartine acknowledges that, with so many occupations, it was lax and totally inefficient.

Government had appointed the 24th of April for the general elections; but while the moderate party anticipated with confidence the day when the nation would come to its own assistance, and complete the work of the revolution, the anarchical and terrorist party viewed the same event with abhorrence, as putting an end to any further chances of insurrection. They accordingly laboured incessantly in the clubs at overthrow

ing the government. Yet Lamartine says that he aided the formation of clubs, because, unlike the time of the Jacobins, they were numerous, because idleness was dangerous, and because he was ready to discuss all questions with their orators, either by himself or by his emissaries. Idle apologies for what the government could not in reality prevent.

Two of the leaders of these clubs were Blanqui and Barbés, both of whom had been extricated from the dungeons of a prison by the revolution. Barbés had seven years before been condemned to death. Lamartine, by his exertions, had got the sentence commuted. When restored to liberty, Barbés came, according to Lamartine, "to throw himself into his arms. Lamartine counselled him against the excesses of what he designates as demagogy, but with the same want of success as in the case of Madame Dudevant. The instincts of the man prevailed; he returned to the doctrine of a radical levelling of conditions and fortunes; "the eternal mirage of the advocates of an absolute equality of goods, from the times of the first Christians and the Gracchi to those of Barboeuf and Marat; virtue in principle, fraternity in institutions, crime and madness in their revolutionary realisation."

He

Barbés became colonel of the legion of the 12th arrondissement. founded a club, which took his name. He was the point of union of the opposition to the bourgeoisie. "He spoke little, and without brilliancy, but he had the accent of a soldier, the faith of a martyr. He was a Spartacus drawn from a dungeon. He resembled the statue of the avenging slave-handsome, but faded by imprisonment, and devoured by the inextinguishable fire of revolutions."

Unlike Barbés, Blanqui was suspected by his own party; a paper had by accident been abstracted from those in possession of M. de Lamartine, which betrayed him as the author of secret revelations made to the king. He was attacked in his own club, but he successfully defended himself, and to his previous reputation was enabled to add that of a martyr to the republic. At Blanqui's club the nobility and the bourgeoisie were alike threatened, but government did not interfere, because, Lamartine says, "the language held there caused a scandal that was useful rather than hurtful to the cause of the regular republic. The actor at that tribune was the drunken Helot, who was exhibited to the Spartans to disgust them with inebriety."

Raspail, another founder of a sect, advocated Communism, but by a voluntary levelling, and not by violent appropriation of the property of others. His theories were vague and delusive, and he could reckon upon 15,000 to 20,000 followers. Cabet, whom Lamartine calls the poet of Communism, was another founder of a sect, to whom he promised a land where the material instincts should be gratified to the exclusion of all higher purposes or objects; and the fate of this immoral chimera is now well known. The club called that of the Quinze-vingts, and that of the Sorbonne, gave the greatest anxiety to the government. They were composed of the most idle, the most profligate, and the most numerous of the working classes. Next to these came the foreign agitators. Among these Lamartine enumerates the Irish, who, united to the English Chartists, hurried to the continent to obtain accomplices in insurrection in France, both from the demagogues, in the name of liberty, and from the Catholics, in the name of Romanism.

The French Republic had been generally recognised. America had set the example, on the principle of conformity of institutions. Switzer

land, "from the egotism," says Lamartine, "of mercantile democracies, which calculate more than they feel," alone held back. Ambassadors were appointed to the different courts, with the exception of England, with whom the close intimacy which existed between Lamartine and Lord Normanby rendered a chargé d'affaires sufficient for the time being. The ministry of Lord Palmerston," says M. de Lamartine, “in accepting the pacific, moderate, and civilising character of the Republic, deserved well from humanity, and will reap its reward in history." Lamartine, however, openly avows that on his part this coalition was interested. An effective attack against the French Republic was, he says, impossible without the aid of England. To gain time was to gain blood and strength to France. At that moment she might have been surprised, and perchance overthrown. With time, war would find France prepared and the Republic armed. It was for the same reason that he was opposed to propagandism in Belgium, whose annexation with France at the first moment must inevitably entail the fall of the Liberal ministry, and constitute a declaration of war with England.

Lamartine says it is unknown by what hand the first circular addressed by Ledru Rollin to the departments on the subject of the elections was written, but it produced at once a rupture in the government itself, and a permanent division of parties in the country. From that moment the Moderates and the Ultra-Republicans were openly opposed to one another throughout the country. Lamartine, terrified at the new aspect of affairs, and disdaining to be associated with such execrable opinions, summoned a secret council on the 16th of March, the day after the appearance of that ominous circular. At the same time he denounced the manifesto of the minister of the interior before the club of the National Guard, and before deputations of the people assembled at the Hôtel de Ville. Such was the dread in which the ministers held their colleague, that Lamartine says he attended the meeting of council armed, and ready for whatever might happen. The Place de la Grève was filled with grenadiers of the National Guard, who came to complain that, by the removal of their bearskin caps, they could no longer be distinguished from the rest of the soldiery. Lamartine says he was annoyed at such puerility at so grave a moment. By this accident, however, the two camps were opposed to one another within and without. Within, Lamartine laid before the council a proclamation which was to supersede that of M. Ledru Rollin. The minority acceded to the document, and it was sent forth to reassure the public mind; but Lamartine adds that it bore the appearance of what it really was, the indication of a struggle going on in the bosom of government itself. The next day it was rumoured by the Opposition that the assemblage of the grenadiers of the National Guard had been arranged by Lamartine to intimidate the minority; and the clubs and working classes were summoned to assemble and march past the Hôtel de Ville, to show their numbers to their enemies. Caussidière undertook to marshal this crowd of Red Republicans. Blanqui and his friends, Lacambre and Flotte, headed the column. The ministry could not oppose the assemblage by force-they had none at their disposal; but they spared no exertions-Marie with the national ateliers, Louis Blane with the workmen; and Lamartine says he sent thousands of emissaries among the crowd. The numbers assembled amounted, it is said, to upwards of 100,000 men, and the procession extended from the