was the Salic law of England, by which his public and political Popery stripped him of his right to the throne. It was the same principle that invested the House of Brunswick with a legitimacy which the heart of the nation did not hesitate to recognise, in spite of unfeigned disgust with the prince in whom the succession was established. To throw the proposition into the abstract--there can be no legitimacy without hereditary majesty, but that member of a royal line is the legitimate king in whom concur all the elements of _constitutional designation_. If the phrase be new, the idea is as old as empire. I mean that constitutional power which, without reference to national choice or personal popularity, selects the true heir of the throne, among the descendants of its ancient possessors, on fixed principles of national law. Thus, in Portugal, the constitution sets aside an idiot heir-apparent for a cadet of the same family, or, if need be, for a collateral relative; while, in France, it proclaims the line of a king extinct in his female heir, and ascends, perhaps, to a remote ancestor for a trace of his rightful successor. It is a principle essentially the same which, in England, pronounces a Popish prince as devoid of hereditary right to the crown, as a bastard, or the child of a private marriage; and by which the hereditary blood, shut off from its natural course, immediately opens some auxiliary channel, and widens it into the main artery of succession, with all the precision of similar resources in physical nature. With such an argument, if I understand him, the Count de Maistre would put you to the blush for sneering _sub rosâ_ at the legitimacy of your Sovereign. I wish his principles were always as capable of being put to the proof, without any absurdity in the reduction. Hereditary majesty is the only material of which constitutions make sovereigns; and that, too, deserves a word in the light which this sage Piedmontese Mentor of France has endeavoured to throw on the subject. It is interesting in the present dilemma of France, which stands like the ass between two haystacks--rejecting one dynasty, but not yet choosing another. I am a republican, you know, holding that my loyalty is due to the constitution of my own country; and yet I subscribe to the doctrine that this idea of _majesty_ is a reality, and that, confess it or not, even republicans feel its reality. _The king's name is a tower of strength_; and inspiration has said to sovereign princes, with a pregnant and monitory meaning--_ye are gods_. This is not the fawning of courts, but the admonition of Him who invests them with His sword of avenging justice, and gives them, age after age, the natural homage of their fellow-men. Not that I would flatter monarchs: I see that they _die like men_, and, what is worse, live, very often, like fools, if not like beasts. Yet I am sure that they have something about them which is personally theirs, and cannot