an ennobling loyalty, he beholds in her the concentrated blood of famous kings, and the propagated soul of mighty monarchs; and when he calls to mind, at the same moment, the thousand strange events and glorious histories which have their august and venerable issue in Victoria, his queen. But you will bring me back to my main business, by asking--who, then, was the legitimate king of France at the beginning of this year? The King of the Barricades was not lacking in hereditary majesty, and you will make out a case of _constitutional designation_, by a parallel between England in 1688, and France in 1830. If you do so, you will greatly wrong your country. The loyalty of England settled in the house of Brunswick, and would have been even less tried if there had been a continuance of the house of Orange; but no French loyalist could ever be reconciled to the dynasty of Orleans. And why? It was not the natural constitution of France, but the mere blunder of a mob, that selected Louis Philippe as the king of the French. It was an election, as the accession of William and Mary was not: it was a choice, and not a necessity--the mere caprice of the hour, and in no sense the rational designation of law. Did ever his Barricade Majesty himself, in all his dreams of a dynasty, pretend that any unalterable principle, or fundamental law of France, had turned the tide of succession from the heir-presumptive of Charles X., and forced heralds upon the backward trail of genealogy, till they could again descend, and so find the hereditary king of the French in the son of Egalité? Louis Philippe was not legitimate, in any reasonable sense of the word; and, could he have made such men as Chateaubriand regard him as other than a usurper, he would not be at Claremont now. That splendid Frenchman uttered the voice of a smothered, but not extinguished, constitution, when he closed his political life in 1830, by saying to the Duchess de Berry--"_Madame, votre fils est mon roi._" He lived to see the secret heart of thousands of his countrymen repeating his memorable words, and died not till Providence itself had overturned the rival throne, and directed every eye in hope, or in alarm, to the only prince in Europe who could claim to be their king.