Napoleon; they pointed at the wires that moved the hands and eyes of the Pope. All stage-effect, machinery, and pasteboard. The imperial court was all what children call _make-believe_: it vanished like the sport of children. The great feast of fraternity, last spring, was, on de Maistre's principles, the natural harbinger of that fraternal massacre in June; and the ineffectual attempt to be festive over the late inauguration of the constitution, has but one redeeming feature to prevent a corresponding augury of disaster. Its miserable failure makes it possible that the constitution will survive its anniversary. Then there will be a demonstration, at any rate, and then the thing will be superannuated. Since 1790, there has been no end to such glorifications; each chased and huzza'd, in turn, by a nation of full-grown children, and all hollow and transient as bubbles. Perpetual beginnings, every one warranted to be _no failure this time_, and each going out in a stench. What continual _Champs-de-Mars_ and _Champs-de-Mai_! what wavings of new flags, and scattering of fresh flowers! and all ending in confessed failure, and beginning the same thing over again! "Nothing great has great beginnings"--says Mentor again. "History shows no exception to this rule. _Crescit occulto velut arbor ævo_,--this is the immortal device of every great institution." Legitimacy never makes such mistakes, except when permitted by GOD, to accomplish its own temporary abasement. It needs not to support itself by tricks and shams. It has a creative power which dignifies everything it touches; which often turns its own occasions into festivals, but makes no festivals on purpose to dignify itself. When Henry V. is crowned at Rheims, or at Notre-Dame, he will not send over the Alps for _Pio Nono_, nor consult _Savans_ to learn how Cæsar should be attired that day. That youth may safely dispense with all superfluous pageantry, for he is not _new Charlemagne_, but _old Charlemagne_. The blood of the Carlovingians has come down to him from Isabella of Hainault, through St Louis and Henry IV. Chateaubriand should not have forgotten this, when (speaking of this prince's unfortunate father, the Duke de Berry) he enthusiastically sketched a thousand years of Capetian glory, and cried--"_He bien! la revolution a livré tout cela au couteau de Louvel_." Another revolution has thus far relegated the same substantial dignity to exile and obscurity, as if France could afford to lose its past, and begin again, as an infant of days. But besides the evident tendency of things to reaction, there is something about the legitimate king of France which looks like destiny. He was announced to the kingdom by the dying lips of his murdered sire, while yet unborn, as if the fate of empire depended on his birth. "_Ménagez-vous, pour l'enfant que vous portez dans votre sein_," said the unhappy man to his duchess, and the group of bystanders was startled! It was the