first that France heard of Henry the Fifth, and it seemed to inspire Chateaubriand with the spirit of prophecy, and he eloquently remarks upon it as a _dernière espérance_. "The dying prince," he says, "seemed to bear with him a whole monarchy, and at the same moment to announce another. Oh GOD! and is our salvation to spring out of our ruin? Has the cruel death of a son of France been ordained in anger, or in mercy? is it _a final restoration of the legitimate throne, or the downfall of the empire of Clovis_?" This grand question now hangs in suspense: but, as I said, Chateaubriand must have taken courage before he died, and inwardly answered it favourably. That great writer seems to have felt beforehand, for his countrymen, the loyalty to which they will probably return. To the prince he stood as a sort of sponsor for the future. When the royal babe was baptised, he presented water from the Jordan, in which the last hope of legitimacy received the name of _Dieu-donné_: when Charles the Tenth was dethroned, he stood up for the young king, and consented to fall with his exclusion; and the last years of France's greatest genius were a consistent confessorship for that legitimacy with which he believed the prosperity of his country indissolubly bound. Now, I should like to ask a French republican--if I could find a sane one,--what would you wish to do with Henry of Bordeaux? Would you wish this heir of your old histories to renounce his birth-right, declare legitimacy an imposition, and undertake to settle down in Paris as one of the people? Why not, if you are all republicans, and see no more in a prince than in a _gamin_? Why should not this Henry Capet throw up his cap for the constitution, and stick up a tradesman's sign in the Place de la Revolution, as "Henry Capet, _parfumeur_?" Why not let him hire a shop in the lower stories of the Palais Royal and teach the Parisians better manners than to cut off his head, by devoting himself to shaving their beards? Everybody knows the reason why not; and that reason shows the reality of legitimacy. Night and day such a shop would be mobbed by friends and foes alike. Go where he might, the _parfumeur_ would be pointed at by fingers, and aimed at by _lorgnettes_, and bored to death by a rabble of starers, who would insist upon it that he was the hereditary lord of France. Mankind cannot free themselves from such impressions, and, what is more conclusive, princes cannot free themselves from the impressions of mankind, or undertake to live like other men, as if history and genealogy were not facts. For weal or for woe, they are as unchangeable as the leopard with his spots. Let Henry Capet come to America, and try to be a republican with us. Our very wild-cats would assert their inalienable right to "look at a king," and he would certainly be torn to pieces by good-natured curiosity.